


The Wedding Planner('s Assistant)

by crinklefries



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Wedding Planner, And the Avengers being annoying, Banter, Bucky Barnes gets a part-time job, Captain America Sam Wilson, Fluff, Humor, I wish there was a plot here, M/M, Meet-Cute, Mutual Pining, Non-Serum Steve Rogers/Winter Soldier Bucky Barnes | Shrinkyclinks, Romantic Comedy, The plot is Bucky being scared of floral arrangements, Wedding Planning, minor unrelated Thor/Loki, oh my god they were neighbors!, smooth-brained Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-28 13:27:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 23,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30140244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crinklefries/pseuds/crinklefries
Summary: Bucky Barnes is in a bit of a conundrum.For example, on the one hand, he’s the former extremely polished, brutally efficient, and impressively ruthless brainwashed weapon of mass murder for the secret Nazi arm of the United States government.On the other hand, he has an uncontrollable crush on the cute blond wedding planner who lives next door.What do you do when HYDRA agents keep climbing through your window and the Avengers can’t seem to leave you the fuck alone? Volunteer to help with wedding planning, he guesses.This won’t be difficult to balance at all.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 247
Kudos: 342





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nalonzoo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nalonzoo/gifts).



> HAPPY BIRTHDAY NIKKI!!!!! Well, your birthday was a month ago, which is when I started writing this fic, in spite of my retirement from the field entirely.
> 
> It's funny that you said this to me:
> 
>   
> 
> 
> Because, in fact, this WAS written for you. I hope you enjoy this absolutely absurd story of Bucky accidentally becoming a wedding planner and falling in love with the cute twink down the hall along the way.
> 
> Thanks for being a shrinkyclinks warrior and always DMing me until 3 am EST and also sorry for all of the times I've ruined your life through casual observation. ♥

  
  
*

Bucky Barnes is in a bit of a conundrum.

This is not unusual for him.

The fact is that Bucky Barnes is almost always in a bit of a conundrum owing to the fact that not three years ago he was the extremely polished, brutally efficient, and impressively ruthless brainwashed weapon of mass murder for the secret Nazi arm of the United States government. One thing led to another and there were some dumb assholes on a bridge and a glorified brawl in an international airplane parking lot, a probably avoidable altercation in Siberia, and he had left the secret Nazi arm of the United States government. With extreme prejudice.

In the three years since he had forcibly, and somewhat explosively, handed in his resignation letter to the authoritarian paramilitary-subversive organization hellbent on world domination, Bucky had: re-embraced his real name, moved five different times to five different countries, gotten a bit of a haircut, introduced solid foods into his diet, caught up on the Internet, watched a lot of HBO, and developed a skincare regime.

It’s been a nice break from all of the murder and brainwashing and forced cryogenics, but then some jackass tried to frame him for taking out half the United Nations, no one would listen to him when he tried to tell them it wasn’t him, he doesn’t do that anymore, and now he can’t catch a fucking break.

It’s mostly the Avengers, if he stops to think about it.

Like, sure his former employers are pretty pissed at him and their company policy is, Bucky’s pretty sure, Shoot The Winter Soldier on Sight, but HYDRA’s kind of a useless organization without Pierce running the show and if the Avengers could stop flushing out his location, he’s pretty sure HYDRA would never find him again.

But the Avengers cannot leave well enough fucking alone and all Bucky really wants to do is sit in a quiet apartment and do a bit of reading, watch some Youtube videos of people cleaning their houses, and make progress on an elaborate cross-stitch pattern he had bought because of an Instagram targeted ad, but instead, he is almost always trying to stop someone from taking a point blank shot to his head and burning down his apartment building.

Sometimes that person is an Avenger. Other times it’s HYDRA. To him, it makes no difference. All he wants is to adopt a fucking cat and he can’t because one of them or the other will probably try to kidnap his precious baby and by now Bucky knows himself well enough to know that he will happily burn down an entire city for a kitten.

Not that he has a cat. For the aforementioned reasons. But if he did.

Anyway, he digresses.

To return to the situation at hand: Bucky Barnes is in a bit of a conundrum.

The conundrum is this: on the one hand, there is a dead HYDRA agent bleeding out on his kitchen floor, another HYDRA goon being throttled under his metal arm, and a fucking sniper rifle aimed at him through his living room window, and on the other, there is a knock on his door interrupting this sequence of events.

Bucky freezes, staring at the point of the sniper rifle and pausing applying pressure on the HYDRA goon who’s currently caught in a merciless headlock.

The goon tries to gurgle out a cry and Bucky chokes him some more.

“Shush!” he says roughly.

The knock comes again.

This time, it’s accompanied by a terribly familiar voice.

“Bucky?” the voice says and Bucky’s breathing grows shallower.

The goon opens his mouth and Bucky claps his flesh hand over his mouth.

“I _said_ ,” Bucky whispers harshly. “Be _quiet_.”

There’s a pause and then one more knock, louder this time.

“Bucky, it’s Steve—your next door neighbor? I ah, okay this is going to sound so cheesy, but I ran out of sugar and I was wondering if you had any to spare? I’m testing out this carrot cake recipe and apparently I don’t have the most important ingredient!” A pause. “Well, I guess the most important ingredient is carrot and I have a ton of those, but imagine eating a sugarless, savory carrot cake. Then it’s just healthy and I don’t feel good contributing to the health industrial complex.”

Bucky, he—well, he’s grinning.

He doesn’t let go of the HYDRA guy he’s trying to choke out, but he does lean toward him a little, just an absolute goopy smile on his face.

“That’s Steve,” he says. “My neighbor.”

Bucky feels like he’s glowing from the inside out. It’s the fact that Steve came to _him_ , to ask _him_ for sugar. I mean, sure, he probably really needs the sugar if he’s making a cake and sure, Bucky lives right across the hall from him so it’s the easiest and most reasonable course of action, but Steve _could_ have gone to Mrs. Khan down the hall for sugar or Mr. Harris, whose daughter is going through a baking phase, or even down one flight of stairs to the Bakers whose last name is _literally_ Baker, but no, Steve had come to _him_ , to Bucky, and that just really puts a bounce in his steps.

Not that he’s bouncing.

Well maybe a little. The HYDRA goon is being jostled a little, and lets out a pathetic little whine in response.

“Must be out,” Bucky hears Steve murmur after waiting a few seconds.

He must wait another moment, because Bucky doesn’t hear him move outside the door. And he _would_ hear him move. He has very good super-soldier hearing.

After another moment, he hears Steve sigh and finally move away from the door.

Bucky gives it another eight, nine seconds, just to make sure Steve has retreated down the hallway for his provisions.

He grins at the HYDRA agent a little and whispers, “He’s really cute.”

The HYDRA goon makes a tiny little gurgled noise that could be a noise of surprise or a noise of congratulations or maybe he is simply running out of air to breathe.

Either way, Bucky takes half a second to deal with the warm, happy bubble in his chest.

Then he snaps the goon’s neck.

Within a second, the glass of his living room window shatters, and a bullet goes blasting into his new IKEA coffee table.

Bucky sighs and lets the dead HYDRA agent fall to the floor.

“I just bought that,” Bucky says, staring at his ruined table in annoyance.

Then, with another sigh, he clips his mask around his mouth, winds up his arm, and jumps through the window to give chase.

*

Here’s what happened.

Bucky was still pretty fresh off of HYDRA, comparatively, as in within the first three years of re-experiencing the concept of free will after about 70 years of torture and an aggressive regimen of brainwashing. He was _fresh_ fresh, as in still referring to himself as the Asset and only thinking in the third person kind of fresh, as in still adjusting to going to the grocery store and picking up more than protein sludge for a meal kind of fresh, as in brain still recently scrambled enough that he’s trying to piece together a semblance of life before he fell off a fucking train and into a multi-decade nightmare kind of fresh.

Sure, the whole thing above the Potomac had happened and he had abandoned his non-contractual obligation to his previous employers and Siberia and the Avengers and the parking lot and etcetera etcetera, but he hadn’t had much time between the fucking Triskellion blowing up and being whaled on by Iron Man in a frigid underground former Nazi lair to really gather a proper sense of self.

So when he had finally moved out of the apartment he was squatting in in Wakanda, after the King’s sister had so kindly and confusingly unscrambled his smooth brain, he had cast high and low for where to make his next move and come up with: fuck it, I’m tired, I’m going back home.

He had left Wakanda, boarded a plane in Nairobi, and flown back to New York City by way of a seven hour layover in Istanbul. He had approximately three boxes and one beat up suitcase of items he owned stashed in a storage unit in Midwood and to that he added one carry-on that contained: two pairs of jeans, a washed hoodie, the notebook he carries with him everywhere, an extra pair of shoes he got in a Wakandan market, some underwear, three sets of knives he had hidden in various pockets, and four boxes of Turkish Delights he had picked up at Duty Free.

He showed up with all of these items and a variety of guns hidden on his body to a nondescript, six story brick building in the middle of Red Hook.

Now, Bucky was The Winter fucking Soldier. He had survived decades of abuse. He had murdered countless men and not a few politically connected women. He used to be the right fist of HYDRA, the deadliest sniper on the planet. He has a metal fucking arm, a genetically enhanced six-pack, and a scowl that could make a frat boy cry.

He could not, however, it seemed, carry three large boxes, a suitcase, and a sizable carry-on through a small Brooklyn apartment door. At least, not all at once. While also trying to key in his passcode to enter the lobby through two glass double doors that seemed built for children.

Now, granted he was simultaneously exhausted and wired from his transcontinental flight and from trekking across half of Brooklyn for his shit, and granted he hadn’t properly talked to another human since the King’s baby sister had dug around in his head while asking him a dozen questions a minute that she would not take no as an answer for, but that probably didn’t excuse how he was so frustrated with the keypad and the boxes and the suitcase situation that he almost rammed his cybertronic arm through the glass door in his ire, causing all three boxes to go tumbling out of his arms onto the ground.

The lack of human interaction is important to understand what happened next.

As Bucky was wrestling with the urge to scream at the top of his lungs like a wounded velociraptor, his boxes battered at his feet, and the blade of at least one knife digging into his calf, he heard a voice.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Bucky froze, staring at his knocked over luggage, with half a plan already formed to burn down the building, strongarm his way onto a ship, and set sail for a neighboring country. He was in the middle of calculating exactly how much explosive he would need to take out the lobby specifically when the voice spoke again.

“That’s a lot of boxes, here let me help.”

Bucky pivoted on his heels so quickly it startled the person trying to help him. This was devastating for a number of reasons, chief of which was that the person had already leaned forward, so Bucky’s sudden movement caused the person’s forehead to ram into Bucky’s chin, and second of which was that because of the ramming, Bucky only noticed how fucking cute the other guy was after they had both stumbled apart and Bucky had fallen over his carry-on onto his ass.

“Ow,” the guy said, looking up from where he was also sprawled on the ground. “Okay, that might have been my fault.”

Bucky, who was a single inconvenience away from shoving one of his knives into the nearest available eye socket, opened his mouth to grind out something that would make this man fear for his mortal soul, and suddenly stopped.

The other man was looking at him, a little bewildered, but mostly bemused. He had bright, blond hair that hung long at the top and was shorn close at the sides, a nose with a conspicuous bend in the middle, and clear blue eyes that were framed by absurdly long, blond eyelashes that refused to be hidden beneath a pair of clear plastic frames. His mouth was a loud pink and at least one of his ear shells was lined with silver piercings.

The striped black and white sweater he was wearing over his collared shirt was twice as big as he was and his dark jeans were ripped at his knobby knees.

He was absurdly, shockingly, horrifyingly _cute_.

“I’m sorry, I should have waited for your answer,” the man said to Bucky, with a wry grin that lit up his almost unconscionably handsome face. “I get ahead of myself sometimes.”

Bucky meant to reply. He thought some words in his head. He formulated a sentence, maybe even two. When he later thought back to this moment, he would swear that he even opened his mouth, despite nothing coming out. In truth, he didn’t even do this. Bucky just sat on his ass and stared.

Instead of seeming offended or presuming, with a perfect degree of validity, that he was fighting a losing battle trying to converse with an alien cyborg with space fruit for brains, the young man just gave Bucky a mildly curious look. When he rubbed his knuckles against his nose, he wrinkled it, and Bucky could say, at that very moment, with a terrifying degree of certainty, that he would rather be strapped to a chair in an underground bunker, armed with nothing but a fucking paperclip to fight his way back out, than spend another unchaperoned moment with this person.

The young man managed to drag himself up to his feet and after brushing himself off, reached a hand down to Bucky. Even sitting on his ass, Bucky came up to his knees. Which was to say that even from this low vantage point, Bucky could tell that the other man was _tiny_. Not his hands, though. His hands were absurdly large, with long fingers that Bucky, the alien cyborg with space fruit for brains, was just staring at.

“Can I help you up? I won’t run into you this time. Promise.”

Somewhere between planning his escape, his demise, and at least three different possibilities of eradicating all evidence of his existence off of the planet, at least one of which involved a comprehensive time travel scheme, Bucky, to his utter shock, reached forward for the stranger’s hand.

He even managed a sentence.

“Thanks.”

Okay, well a word. In some countries, that was practically a sentence.

The man grinned at him and grasped Bucky’s flesh hand and, with a surprising amount of strength, pulled him to his feet.

“All good?” he asked.

Bucky took stock of his body and finding nothing missing or having been altered with another metal element, nodded.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry about that,” the guy said again. “Are you moving in?”

Bucky looked at his sad boxes and his sad luggage and nodded again.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, great! What floor?”

Despite his better judgment, Bucky looked away from his possessions and back to the person who, inexplicably, was still talking to him. With _good_ humor. Maybe Bucky wasn’t the only one with space fruit for brains.

“Uh,” Bucky said. “Fourth.”

The guy—and there was truly no other way to put this— _lit_ up. His grin took over his face, his eyes brightening and crinkling at the corners, as though this was the best news he had heard all week, as though he could not have asked for a better outcome than this—for a stranger with the social skills of a knife-wielding toddler to be moving into the fourth floor of this generic, brick facade Brooklyn apartment building.

“Really? Me too!”

Bucky almost blanched in horror.

“Oh,” he managed to say, instead. “Very...cool.”

“Yeah!” the man said and then, leaving Bucky no time to escape in anonymous mortification or find a different country to live in using a long burned alias, he reached his very large hand out. “I’ll be your neighbor, then. Steve. Steve Rogers.”

Bucky could not freeze and stare at this cute young man’s appendage again. Even _he_ had his limits. So he put on his big boy’s non-cyborg thinking cap and reached out, taking Steve’s hand with unmitigated horror and some horrible twisting, fluttering thing in his stomach that he could not explain and, furthermore, refused to acknowledge.

“James,” he says. And then, after a moment of grinding his teeth, “But you can call me Bucky.”

“Bucky!” Steve smiled again. His handshake was firm and his palm warm against Bucky’s own. It was a tragedy. Everything about Bucky’s immediate life was a tragedy. “Well let me get the door for you and then I can help you lug all of those boxes up the elevator.”

“Oh,” Bucky swallowed, ignoring his stomach or the way he couldn’t seem to stop staring at the way Steve’s hair was flopping into his face. “That’s...okay. You don’t...have to.”

“Nonsense,” Steve said and stepped around Bucky to begin keying in the code. “This is Brooklyn. New Yorkers aren’t nice, but we are kind. Anyway, moving sucks ass and if we’re going to be neighbors, it’s the least I can do.”

Bucky stared at the slight slope of Steve’s back and thought this over.

“The boxes are heavy,” he said. He looked dubiously at the boxes, which were at least a third of the size of Steve himself.

“Don’t worry about that,” Steve said with a grin. He opened the door and Bucky moved out of the way so he could prop it open.

Then, in one fluid movement that left Bucky startled and not a little bemused, Steve bent down and scooped up one of the boxes, easy as anything.

Bucky couldn’t help but ogling, jaw hanging open so wide a fucking bird could fly in.

“I might be small, but I’m a hell of a lot stronger than I look,” Steve said, with a chuckle. Then he fucking _winked_ at Bucky and walked into the apartment lobby with his box of possessions.

It took Bucky’s brain at least three beats to catch up with the events of the past fifteen minutes. He watched Steve go and after he had processed the line of his shoulders and the tight little ass walking away from him and managed to unstick his tongue from the roof of his mouth, he cursed lightly to himself. Then, grabbing two boxes at once, he followed Steve inside.

  
So anyway, that was what had happened and Bucky has had to live with the horrible knowledge that the obscenely cute blond with the deep voice and long fingers and eyelashes brushing the top of cheekbones so sharp they could cut diamonds, is just down the hall from him.

It’s mostly fine, in that if Bucky sees Steve in the hallway, he climbs into a vent to make sure they don’t run into each other, and if he _does_ run into him, he always manages to hold a conversation with him. Using words, assembled together, in some manner of sentence structure that Steve understands enough to respond to.

And sure, Bucky once ran into him in the laundry room and almost abandoned all of his clothes to the machines, with the intention of just buying a whole new wardrobe, in order to not be in a room with Steve and his pretty eyes and his cute mouth for longer than it takes for Steve to say hello to him.

And okay, once Steve definitely brought home a date and Bucky had, after, put on his Winter Soldier mask, stalked the large, bearded man from the building into the alley two blocks away to threaten that if he _ever_ so much as thought of hurting Steve, he would live to regret it.

And all right, maybe Bucky once spent a whole weekend Googling _what kind of men twinks like_ and _what kinds of clothes twinks like big men to wear_ and ended up getting a whole new wardrobe and enough new hair products to fill two shelves in his bathroom so that he could look effortlessly nice in the off chance he ever runs into his neighbor and _doesn’t_ crawl into a vent on sight.

It’s all extremely okay, just perfectly fine, because Bucky has this under control.

So what if the Winter fucking Soldier has a crush on the handsome, sweet, funny young man living across the hallway from him? Bucky has destroyed an entire fucking government organization, how much trouble can a cute blond twink be?

*

The thing is, it’s sort of a funny accident.

Bucky is relaxing in his apartment, having repaired the window and dumped the ruined IKEA table and replaced it with a nicer one he stole from a millionaire’s penthouse apartment in Park Slope, with a glass of scotch and the second volume of a science fiction trilogy he is obsessed with when he hears yelling.

Bucky doesn’t think, he just acts. His book is sprawled open on the couch, the glass of scotch so hurriedly shoved onto the coffee table that it’s still shaking as he wrenches open the door and darts across the hallway.

It’s Steve’s voice.

Steve’s yelling and Bucky’s heart is pounding and he’s going to kill them, he is going to fucking rip every single head off of every fucking HYDRA agent’s goddamned fucking shoulder if they so much as touch a _hair_ on his head.

Bucky’s heart is pounding in his chest as he goes skidding to the ground in front of Steve’s door, his metal hand brushing along the floor.

Without waiting, without even fucking thinking, Bucky kicks the door open.

“ _Get the fuck_ —” he starts to shout, only the words die on his tongue as his brain, always in hyperdrive, catalogues the situation in rapid speed. Windows: intact. Destruction: none. Perimeter: unbreached.

Subject: in the middle of his living room in overly large pajamas, glasses askew on the bridge of his nose, a phone held up to his ear, face blotchy pink, with a newly formed surprised expression across it.

“I—” Steve says into the phone. He clears his throat. “Actually, I will call you back tomorrow. Yup. Yes, consider what I suggested. Okay, bye.”

Steve hangs up on the phone and lowers it.

Bucky’s adrenaline spike is making it difficult to assess the situation with any kind of clarity, but if he were to say, he would say that Steve is not in any sort of danger.

“Oh,” he says, stupidly.

“Bucky,” Steve says. “Did you...break down my door?”

Bucky blinks and considers this.

“Yes,” he says. He chews on his bottom lip and tries to calm his clattering heart rate down. “But I can. Fix that.”

“I see,” Steve says. He nods and pushes his glasses up his nose. “Is there a reason you broke down my door?”

“Oh,” Bucky says. And then, “Yes.”

“I see,” Steve says again. Then, considering, he nods at Bucky. “Okay, well. Come on in. You can tell me all about it over a glass of wine. You look like you could use it, your eyes are all crazy. I also could probably use it as, I suspect, my eyes are also probably all crazy.”

  
Bucky does not, in fact, tell Steve “all about it.” There is no reasonable way he could explain _hey, I thought you were getting kidnapped and/or tortured by the current employees of my former employer, which, by the way, happens to have been a shady paramilitary shadow organization that has been seizing different branches of the government since WWII, which, by the way, I also served in, and also, I killed JFK._ Well, there’s no reason he would have had to explain the latter fact to Steve, but it does weigh on his conscience sometimes.

Anyway, Bucky helps fix the door and makes up some passable excuse about hearing Steve yelling and panicking because of some trauma he faces from military enlistment and Steve’s eyes go wide and he apologizes profusely, which makes Bucky feel like shit. Not like enough of a shit to explain the true nature of his situation to Steve, but enough of a shit that he almost swallows his entire glass of wine in a single gulp.

“Fuck, I’m so sorry, Bucky,” Steve says, running a hand through his obscenely already-tousled hair. “I was just on the phone with a client who is driving me _insane_. I don’t like to badmouth clients because they’re usually stressed and I like, get that, but this client is...an absolute high strung diva. He second-guesses every single thing I say and he second-guesses everything _he_ says and I know it’s his big day and he wants to make sure it’s perfect, but my god, at least give me some credit for doing my job. And also maybe stop changing your goddamned mind on hydrangeas once every fucking day.”

Steve looks a little pink in the face after that and he also drains the rest of his wine with a frustrated sigh.

Bucky has no idea what kind of client Steve might have that involves extremely divisive opinions on hydrangeas. Maybe he’s a gardener of some sort? A...landscape architect?

Oh! Bucky sits up straight. Maybe he owns a flower shop!

“So yeah, I maybe lost my shit at him a little,” Steve says, looking over at Bucky with a bit of embarrassment. “I’m not usually that unprofessional. But, okay, between you and me, that client is an unrepentant pain in my ass, but he’s also my friend.”

“Oh,” Bucky says and nods. That makes sense.

“I need more wine,” Steve announces and unfolds himself from his couch. “More wine?”

Bucky looks at his empty glass and nods again.

“Yes, please.”

Steve gives him a loose, easy smile, warm and lazy, probably because of the alcohol, and Bucky has to bite the inside of his cheeks.

Luckily, he gets a chance to breathe after Steve plods to the kitchen and he takes the breather to look around. Steve’s apartment is small and compact, just like his, but where Bucky’s is mostly unfurnished, with select pieces of furniture and mostly empty walls, Steve’s is bright and full of personality. His furniture is all dark woods and white cushions, with teal accent pillows. There’s a vase of flowers on his dining table and potted plants all over—small flowers and succulents and hanging ferns and a small tree with weird, jagged leaves. There’s artwork on the wall and a large TV hanging above an entertainment center that’s filled with DVDs. There’s a bookshelf against one wall that leads into a hallway and the shelf is neatly kept, with books and small succulents and little knickknacks.

There’s a corner that’s clearly his workspace, a large desk with an old, silver lamp taking up the only corner not covered with papers and colored pencils, envelopes, ribbons, a large, overflowing planner, and a whole case of buttons.

Curious, Bucky gets up from the couch to take a look. In addition to the things he could see from the couch, he finds scattered invitations, little crafts cutters and stamps, and a stack of bridal magazines.

“Oh no!” Steve says and Bucky’s stomach clenches. He whirls around, ready to offer an apology for trespassing, but Steve just looks pink and embarrassed. “My work area is a disaster, don’t look! God, you really are going to think I’m the worst professional, instead of one of the best wedding planners in the city.”

Bucky’s face goes a little blank there—mostly because he’s trying to process this new information.

He looks at Steve again, his cute, striped pajamas and his clear glasses, his ear full of silver hoops, and a tattoo that he can now see is covering his collarbone. Okay.

“Yeah,” Steve grins a little and offers Bucky his wine glass again. “It took off a few years ago. I did the wedding for a friend of a friend who happened to know uh, Tony Stark?”

Bucky’s face remains blank, but he crosses back over and takes the glass with a small thanks.

“He was engaged at the time and he liked what he saw and he uh, well, one thing led to another and I had three meetings in a row with Pepper Potts and she loved my boards and then suddenly I was planning the wedding of the fucking century,” Steve says.

He’s curled back up on his side of the couch, so Bucky takes the other end again, carefully keeping his face buried in his glass.

Steve’s happily talking though, his face glowing with pride.

“It took nearly two years, but that wedding...it was one of my best,” he says. “And I uh, guess others agreed because they featured me in Cosmopolitan and my phone hasn’t stopped ringing since.”

“You must be busy,” Bucky says, in observation.

“I am!” Steve says, happily. He smiles, but then the smile fades at the edges. He nods and runs a hand through his hair. “I am, I am.”

Bucky might have space fruit in his head, but even he can hear the _but_.

“But?” he prompts.

Steve looks a little guilty, as though he feels ashamed to admit it.

“ _But_ ,” he says and sighs. “But I started off as a one-man business, with good contacts and a stupid work ethic, but now I have too many weddings and too many binders and too many brides and grooms wanting to get married on conflicting dates and I’m up to my ears in flowers and cake toppers and if I have to taste one more buttercream again, I’ll die, Bucky, I’ll _die_.”

Bucky stares at him.

Steve takes a deep breath.

“You’re doing the crazy eyes again,” Bucky says.

Steve stares at him, pink-faced, and then starts to laugh.

He groans and runs a hand down his face.

“Ugh, I know, I know!” he says. “I’m losing my mind! I haven’t added anyone else to the business because I don’t trust anyone else to do anything or manage any of my details, but every single weekend is booked up, and wedding photographers charge an arm and a fucking leg now, and I haven’t had a week off in, god, fourteen? Months? I’m tired. Bucky, I am really tired.”

And he looks it.

Bucky doesn’t really know Steve, but he can see the bags under his eyes, the way his shoulders are shaking, and how drooped he is, not to mention the crazy eyes.

It doesn’t seem fair that Bucky can be mostly retired from a life of continental chaos and violent destruction and Steve can’t take a day off because he has too many clients and no one he can trust enough to help him.

Maybe it’s because Steve is looking so rumpled and tired and soft in his pjs or maybe it’s because of the wine, which, to be clear, does not affect Bucky at all or maybe it’s because he is being absolutely pummeled sideways by this blooming, uncontrollable crush, but the thing that comes out of Bucky’s mouth next is not something he could ever have anticipated saying.

Bucky opens his mouth and what he says is: “I’ll help you.”

Steve blinks up at him, unsure of what he’s heard.

“What?”

“I,” Bucky says. He blinks. “I’ll help you. My job is...part-time. So I have time. And I can help.”

Steve runs his hand through his hair again and looks at Bucky dubiously.

“I want to help,” Bucky says.

Steve hums and then sits up straighter.

“Are you sure?” he asks. “Have you...ever done any wedding planning before? Do you know anything about flowers? Invitation fonts? Chair covers?”

“No,” Bucky says, point blank. He clears his throat. “But I ah. Can learn. Also I can lift things. A lot of them. And I have a car.”

Steve blinks at him.

“You do?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t. He makes a note to himself: steal a car that can carry wedding supplies.

“Oh,” Steve says. He nods. Then he looks at Bucky again and he nods harder. “Okay. I could pay you.”

“That’s okay,” Bucky says, but Steve shakes his head firmly.

“No,” he says, voice stern. “I’ll only do this if I can pay you. I can hire you.”

“I—” Bucky starts, but although he might be the Winter Soldier, Steve Rogers has a look that would bring any HYDRA agent to their knees. He shudders and straightens. “Okay. Thank you.”

Steve nods. He drains his glass of wine, puts it on the table, then with a firm grin, sticks out his hand.

“Welcome to Eagle & Shield Event Planning, Bucky Barnes.”

Bucky, bemused, somewhat excited, and definitely _not_ drunk, takes Steve’s hand and shakes it.

This is how the Winter fucking Soldier becomes a wedding planning assistant.

Sort of.

*


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You would think being a part-time, self-hired mercenary seeking to single-handedly and systematically destroy the remaining vestiges of your former employer, whom you harbor a murderous dislike toward, would make it slightly difficult and a little awkward to also pick up a part-time job as a wedding planning assistant, and you would be right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm overwhelmed and thrilled by the response to this! Thank you so much for reading and for your truly lovely comments. They all made me smile and some even made me laugh out loud! I'll try to be better about replying to comment this chapter sdhfhsfhjjj ♥

You would think being a part-time, self-hired mercenary seeking to single-handedly and systematically destroy the remaining vestiges of your former employer, whom you harbor a murderous dislike toward, would make it slightly difficult and a little awkward to also pick up a part-time job as a wedding planning assistant, and you would be right.

At first, it’s perfectly manageable.

During the weekdays, Bucky generally has a very fluid schedule that mostly consists of monitoring different HYDRA-affiliated websites, message boards, and radio signals and going through Red Hook and feeding any stray cats that he finds. Sometimes he has a self-appointed mission that takes him away from the neighborhood, when, for example, his monitoring shows an uptick in HYDRA-adjacent or HYDRA-affiliated activity in the tristate area or when, on occasion, he finds a message board where some cotton-candy-for-brains dumbass has detailed the latest knockoff terrorist attempt to take out the Avengers. Don’t get him wrong, Bucky’s no _fan_ , they’re actually mostly a pain in his occasionally rotund ass, but it really pisses him off that someone just goes and lays out the whole scheme on a dark website where any scientific experiment of a former assassin with Russian hacking skills can see.

If you’re going to be a pain in the Avengers’ ass (something he’s in favor of), then at least be smart about it. Make them work for it.

Anyway, it doesn’t really keep him that busy and HYDRA agents are, by and large, too chickenshit to break into his apartment building during daylight hours, so the weekdays are pretty easy for him to help Steve on his wedding planning errands.

Over the course of the next few weeks, Bucky helps Steve: print out invitations, reprint fucked up invitations, label envelopes, re-label fucked up envelopes, create table centerpieces using multicolored cellophane, flowers, glass beads, little commemorative plates with brides and grooms faces on it, and something called a Cricut, plan out extensive seating charts given so many restrictions Bucky is pretty sure it was easier to draw up WWII battle plans, look through a dozen different wedding photographer portfolios, and yell at a variety of venues for a variety of reasons that Steve explains and Bucky promptly forgets.

He learns a lot about the wedding industry, namely how it’s a giant scam.

This is fine, mostly. Bucky personally can’t imagine spending the amount on a cake that he had spent on rent the entirety of his adulthood in the 40s, but sure. He learns the term Bridezillas one evening when Steve is ready to risk it all to walk off of his fire escape and Bucky has to drag him back into his apartment by the back of his collar and settle him down with wine and a package of Oreos.

Mostly, it’s a lot of fun.

Bucky’s a hard worker and Steve’s a firm, but encouraging boss and by the third week of their new work arrangement, they work like a well-oiled machine, Steve knocking on his door before noon and Bucky closing all of his laptops and hiding his spy equipment and replacing them with the Cricut he had stolen from a former beauty queen who lives on the first floor and annoys him by always trying to flirt with Steve when she catches him in the lobby.

It’s devastating because not only is Steve horribly handsome and not only does he wrinkle his nose when he laughs and turn a cute pink when he’s embarrassed, but Bucky also discovers that he is exceptionally good at what he does, displaying a frightening degree of competence that does unspeakable things to the already unspeakable things happening in Bucky’s stomach. Incidentally, Bucky also learns the term competence kink.

Steve is also smart and funny and when he’s had a long day and Bucky’s still over at his apartment up to his eyeballs in tinsel and Steve’s had more than one glass of wine, he’ll turn a little pink around the edges and start shouting about things like how the United States government is a complete and abject embarrassment that deserves to be dismantled from top down, reasons why capitalism can go fuck itself, what the guillotine can do for the American wealth aristocracy, and how much he _hates_ Pnina Tornai wedding dresses.

“Seriously,” Steve says one evening, after his third glass of wine, when he is just _drunk_ and his eyes are shining and he’s waving his hands all over the place and sitting a little too close to Bucky on the couch. “They’re. Fuckin’. Awful. If I had to choose one enemy, the one person I hate the most in this entire world, it would be Pnina Tornai. My nemesis. Well, one of two.”

“Really?” Bucky asks. “The one person you hate most? In the whole world?”

“My one enemy,” Steve pronounces, nodding gravely.

Bucky tries to smother his smile.

“Shit. What’d she ever do to you?”

“What _hasn’t_ she done to me?” Steve says loudly, waving his arms wide. “Like, listen, I’m sure she’s a very nice person, I have no reason to think otherwise, but her dresses look like someone took a skeleton’s rib cage and decided to get married in it.”

“I don’t know,” Bucky muses over his glass of wine. “I bet Mary Shelley would be into that.”

“Do you see Mary Shelley on our list of clients? If Mary Shelley wants to come back from the dead and get married in a Pnina Tornai dress, then and only then will I consider it somewhat appropriate instead of an abomination against the wedding industry and the concept of love,” Steve says waspishly.

Bucky outright grins. He drains his wine.

“Who’s the other one?”

Steve scratches his nose.

“What?”

“You said she was one of two nemeses. Who’s the other?”

Steve also finishes what’s left of his wine and smacks his lips. “Oh, that’s easy.”

“Uh huh,” Bucky says. “Who?”

Steve’s expression darkens. His fingers close tightly around the stem of his glass. He looks like a billowing stormcloud as he says, “J Edgar Hoover.”

Bucky tries not to laugh.

“Right,” he says. “Naturally.”

He has to reach for the bottle of pinot noir to hide his horribly fond smile. Maybe he’ll tell Steve about the time he had raided the man’s office and destroyed his surveillance equipment another day.

  
Anyway it’s all fun and games and Bucky nursing an embarrassingly overwhelming crush on his cute next door neighbor until he’s in the middle of taking out a fucking HYDRA base in fucking Paramus, New Jersey and his phone rings.

It’s the weekend that gets him into trouble.

He’s climbing out of the basement of an abandoned telephone factory building one Saturday evening, having knocked out and tied up all of the HYDRA agents who had tried to shoot him, stripped the cartridges from their weapons, and wiped their computers clean after uploading their files onto a private server only he has access to. He’d stolen some of their spy equipment and dismantled the rest and set explosives around the room.

He’s in a good mood. He’s climbing out of the window, _whistling_ , thinking about picking up some donuts for himself on the way home.

He’s out of the window and rolling to his feet, ready to dash across the empty parking lot when his phone rings.

Bucky blinks wildly.

Then he says, “Shit.”

There’s only one person who has his number.

Heart in his throat, Bucky slides the button to talk. He looks over his shoulder with a worried look.

“Hey Steve,” he says.

“Hey, Buck!” Steve says. This is a new thing—Steve had gotten a little tipsy after the Singh wedding last weekend and decided _Bucky_ was too long of a name for his then brain capacity. Bucky is, of course, thrilled about the whole thing. Maybe not at this very moment, but generally speaking. Just delighted.

“What’s up?” Bucky asks. He’s the Winter Soldier so his voice doesn’t hitch in anticipation, but you know. The building’s about to go and he needs to start running like, fifteen seconds ago.

“Sorry to call you on a Saturday afternoon like this, but uh, are you busy?” Steve asks.

The hairs stand up on the back of Bucky’s neck. His eyes zoom in on a sniper rifle trained on him from two rooftops away.

Shit. _Shit_.

Bucky takes a breath.

“Nope,” he says. “What’s up?”

“It’s just that,” Steve says and takes his own breath. Bucky, by now, can tell when Steve’s gearing up for a rather lengthy ramble so he crosses himself in thanks to the Almighty and starts running.

“Well, the Locklear wedding is turning into a huge disaster. The groom drank too much at his bachelor party and may or may not have made out with one of his groomsmen and the bride just found out that she’s four months pregnants and will have to have her wedding dress let out for the wedding, if there even _will_ be a wedding at this point, they haven’t decided yet what to do about his latent queer proclivilities that may or may not be surfacing just now at the eve of the day where he’s going to eternally, or for a while, commit himself to his bride-to-be.”

“Huh,” Bucky gasps out as he dodges a sniper shot that blasts into the car next to him. “Sucks.”

“Right? Hey, what was that noise?”

“Oh nothing, nothing,” Bucky says as he jumps over the hood of the car and rolls to the ground on the other side. “Go on.”

“Weird, thought I heard something,” Steve says. He sighs and Bucky can imagine him pushing his fingers into his floppy fringe, the way he always does when he’s frustrated. “Anyway, so that’s a whole thing that I’m trying to deal with and then the venue for the Keller wedding just called and wants to rebook the whole thing because of some pipe issue and oh! The fucking goddamned caterers for the Martinez wedding cancelled on us.”

“What?” Bucky gasps as another shot barely misses his shoulder. “But we spent a week—”

“Getting them to agree to a goddamned taco food truck, I know!” Steve says, heatedly. “Can you believe that? Like what, we’re made of fucking time? If you were going to pull out at the last minute anyway, then why the whole fuss? We could have saved ourselves a whole fucking headache and gone with the other caterers anyway, I liked their guacamole better.”

Bucky makes a noise of assent and nearly curses and drops his phone as the windshield of the car shatters. He drags himself to his feet, wincing. He’s gotta take this motherfucker out. It’s going to take him a minute to get to the lookout building, but more pressingly, there’s a fucking telephone factory that has multiple tons of explosives lining its basement.

“Anyway, none of that is why I called you, actually,” Steve says, blowing out a breath. “This is about the other wedding I’m working on. The one that’s driving me out of my mind?”

“Isn’t that all of them?” Bucky manages to say as he starts to run again.

“Okay, whatever,” Steve says, but Bucky can hear the wry smile in his voice. “No, but this is the _big_ one. With the diva client who’s going to make me go bald by my mid-30s.”

“Oh yeah,” Bucky says, panting a little as he speeds up. If he remembers the timer properly, he has like maybe fifteen seconds to get under cover before a fireball goes up behind him and alerts all of Paramus to suspicious activity. “Your friend. The client whose name you won’t tell me.”

“I signed forms, Buck,” Steve says, sternly. “Anyway, not the point. The point is that he’s changed his mind about the flowers _yet fucking again_ and I just don’t have time to go down to the shop tonight, I’m completely swamped and the Locklears keep calling me every ten seconds, like I’ve missed four calls from them since I’ve been talking to you. I really wouldn’t ask you for this unless I really needed to, especially on your day off, I know you must be busy or out on a hot date or—”

“No, no,” Bucky gasps. He sees a little sign and a stone outcropping where the parking lot turns to grass and slopes down a bit. He dashes for there, while counting down in his head. “That’s fine. Flowers. Can pick up.”

Five—

Four—

“Oh, really?” Steve’s voice brightens.

Three—

“Yeah,” Bucky chokes out and hurls himself behind the stone. “No prob.”

Two—

“Oh god, Bucky, you’re such a—”

One—

There’s a deep, rumbling, earsplitting explosion as the telephone factory goes up in a fiery ball.

“Fuck,” Bucky mutters, wincing as the air around him roils with heat and pressure.

He looks up wildly and watches just as the sniper falls backwards on the roof.

Fucking amateur.

“What...was that?” Steve asks over the phone. “I heard something.”

Bucky’s heart is racing and his ears are ringing and he leans against the stone, the phone clutched to his ear, his metal hand clutched to his throbbing chest.

“Car uh backfire,” Bucky says.

“Really?” Steve sounds suspicious. “That sounded a lot bigger than a car backfire. ….where are you anywhere?”

“New Jersey,” Bucky rasps out.

Steve pauses.

“That’s horrible,” he says. “Is this a hostage situation? Do I need to get the SWAT team out to you?”

Despite the ringing in his ears and the sniper that still needs to be dealt with, Bucky grins.

“You have the SWAT team on speed dial?”

“You don’t know the wedding emergencies I’ve faced,” Steve says conspiratorially into the phone.

Bucky chuckles and runs his metal hand over his face. God, he has it _so fucking bad_.

The sniper reemerges on the roof.

Shit.

“Hey, Steve? I gotta go,” Bucky says.

“Oh right, right,” Steve says. “Okay, well I’ll send you the address and if you can pick up the arrangements and bring them over, I’d owe you like, my kidney.”

“Noted,” Bucky says and drags himself to his feet.

“Thanks Buck. Oh and remember,” Steve says, his voice dead serious now. “Under no circumstance can there be _any_ hydrangeas.”

*

Okay, well first of all, Bucky has no idea what hydrangeas look like.

After the ringing in his head subsides, he scales the side of the five story building, flushes out the sniper, makes neat work of him, steals his bullets and bends his rifle in half, hops back out of the building, and hot wires a car to take him back to the van, which he had parked just outside of Paramus.

By the time he gets back to Brooklyn, he’s hungry and he becomes aware of how his entire body smells like gunpowder and cinders. Frowning, he parks the car at a meter two blocks away from the flower shop, shoves out of his nondescript, possibly ruined black hoodie, and shoves on a loose, navy blue cardigan over his beat up undershirt. He looks in the rearview mirror, frowns and rubs out smudges of gun residue and dried blood off of his forehead and chin, ties his hair back, and gathers all of his loose change so that he doesn’t get a goddamned ticket. He’s not above breaking into the New York City Department of Finance and deleting their entire goddamned database if they have the audacity, but, admittedly, he has rather a lot on his hands these days.

The flower shop is called My Little Peony and it has a cute little storefront set in a run-down brick building right in the middle of Crown Heights. The store itself has a wide black awning and thick black wooden frames that jut out from the brick facade and huge glass windows that allow passers to see the array of colors and floral arrangements inside. Outside, there are large potted plants and bright flowers, with a little sandwich board on the sidewalk that has a cute bouquet drawn in purple and white chalk and the words _let life bloom_ in neat cursive underneath.

It’s all extremely aesthetic and cute and Bucky has never felt more like an invasive weed.

At least that’s what he thinks until he goes through the open door and is greeted by: flowers. This seems obvious, given the nature of the establishment, but Bucky somehow had not been prepared for the sheer _scale_ of it all, the number of flowers and arrangements and different kinds of plants there can be. There are wreaths of flowers hanging from the ceiling, potted plants and vines creeping over tall, white shelves, and within those shelves, rows of pots and baskets of more shapes and colors and materials than Bucky thinks exists cells in his brain.

There are flowers of reds and pinks, yellows and purples, blues and a multitude of oranges. There are white flowers, which Bucky theoretically knew existed, but there are _multiple_ of them, many shades of _white_ , of all shapes and sizes, some in clusters, some whole, and some that are like tiny berries at the end of long, spindly branches.

There’s just no way one person could identify, let alone learn how to take care of and arrange all of these plants. He’ll take a moving target through a scope the size of a quarter from a hundred yards away any fucking day.

Anyway, he’s in the middle of being overwhelmed by the very concept of flowers when a young, Black woman with blue braids, a septum piercing, and coke bottle glasses emerges from behind an enormous fern.

“Oh, hey there,” she says. “Sorry, didn’t hear you come in. How can I help you?”

“Uh, I’m here to pick up some arrangements,” he says, self consciously. “For uh. Steve Rogers?”

“Steve Rogers, that sounds familiar,” the young woman says. She wipes her hands on the blue overalls she’s wearing over a black shirt with yellow daisies. He wonders if it’s company policy and also if her name is something like Rose or Lily or Petunia. “I think the boss wrote down something about some orders. Come with me to the counter?”

Bucky nods silently and follows her.

“So who’s Steve?” she asks, over her shoulder. She grins as they get to the counter and she swings around to look through the papers. “Someone special? Is he cute?”

Bucky feels himself blush so vibrantly, he can see it in his reflection in the florist’s glasses.

“No,” he says, with a bit of a manly squeak. “Just. My boss.”

The young woman’s grin widens knowingly.

“A cute boss?” she asks, but before Bucky can splutter some kind of an embarrassing answer or otherwise incriminate himself, she finds what she’s looking for. “Oh, here it is. Eagle & Shield?”

“Yes,” Bucky says, face hot, sending a silent thanks to the wedding planning deities, assuming there are any and it’s not just a big bouquet of calla lilies in the sky.

“Jesus, this is some kind of an order,” she says. “You planning an event or stealing our inventory?”

“The client is uh, particular,” Bucky says.

The woman just nods, slightly bemused.

“Okay, Jordan’s left a bunch of arrangements in the back for you, but you’re going to have to help me sort through them so you don’t leave with half the store. Do you have any idea what the bride’s looking for?”

“Uh,” he says.

“Flowers that she loves?” the young woman asks.

“Um,” he says.

“Particular smells?” the young woman suggests.

“Smells,” Bucky repeats, slowly, as though from the depths of the slumber.

“Colors?” the florist says.

Bucky starts to sweat.

“What do you know about what the bride is looking for?” the florist asks, gently.

Holy shit.

Bucky realizes, like cops coming to the fight three movies late, that he doesn’t know _anything_.

He doesn’t know the client. He doesn’t know flowers. He barely has a functioning sense of smell. He’s going to fuck this up. He’s going to say the wrong thing and pick the wrong arrangements and then the client is going to be pissed and then they’re going to yell at Steve and then Steve is going to be pissed and then Steve is going to walk off of his fire escape when Bucky isn’t there to pull him back and then Bucky is going to have to handle the rest of his wedding accounts and _that_ will be an unmitigated disaster because Bucky’s sense of aesthetic is like, three knives in a trench coat. _Then_ maybe the wedding will get called off and the business will go under and Bucky will be held responsible for destroying a very successful wedding planning business as well as an entire relationship, to say nothing of accidentally driving a whole man off of a literal ledge.

The young woman is staring at him, her mouth twitching at the corner.

Something flickers in his panicked, flower-addled brain. A word. One single directive.

“No. Hydrangeas,” he gasps out.

The young woman pauses. It’s not that she’s laughing at him _per se_ , but she definitely sees the sweat forming on his brow and the panic in his eyes and he’s one monosyllabic answer away from turning into a mime on the spot.

“Okay, well,” she says, as kindly as someone is able to say to a stranger who is suffering a floral-related coronary in front of their eyes. “That’s sort of helpful. Let me see what we have.”

Bucky grasps the edge of the counter as she disappears into the back and that’s when his phone rings again.

He digs it out and says, “Steve.”

“Hey, Buck!” Steve says, sounding chipper. “Did you make it to the florist?”

“Flowers,” Bucky says. He’s still mid-panic and now his entire brain has transformed into an orchid.

“Yeah, there’s a ton over there, right?” Steve says. “There are a couple of shops that I have contracts with, but that place is the fucking best. I use it for all of my best clients.” A pause. “And the ones who are paying me enough to put up with their theatrics.”

Bucky will show Steve fucking theatrics.

“Steve,” Bucky says and his voice croaks despite himself, which catches Steve’s attention.

Not one hour ago he had sent an entire fucking Nazi building up in flames and this is what makes Steve worry.

“Hey, are you okay? What’s up?”

Bucky takes in a huge breath.

“Steve, I don’t. Know,” he says. “Anything. About flowers.”

There’s a slight pause over the line.

“She asked questions,” Bucky says through grit teeth. “What. Flowers. And colors. Smells. I don’t know anything.”

“Oh,” Steve says and Bucky panics just a little, not wanting to disappoint him.

“I said no hydrangeas!”

“Oh!” Steve says again, but brighter this time. “Okay, great. Well that’s the main thing. He was obsessed with hydrangeas for like two months and so every arrangement had them in it and of course he decided overnight that he’s out on hydrangeas now and wants a completely different floral theme and that’s why you’re down there at 8 pm on a Saturday on your day off. Do you know any flowers?”

Bucky thinks as hard as he can.

“Roses,” he says, slowly. He looks around the flower shop. “And...daisies.”

“Oh, my favorite,” Steve says and Bucky can hear the smile in his voice. “Well, luckily, you don’t have to know anything. The florist will bring you a bunch of different options and then you can Facetime me and we can go through them and you can bring back the ones that we pick. Does that sound okay?”

“Yes,” Bucky says in sudden, overwhelming relief. Facetime. He knows how to do that.

“Great!” Steve says and Bucky can imagine his face lighting up. “That sounds perfect.”

It makes him calm down a little, to imagine Steve, cute and happy, surrounded by a pile of wedding invitations and waiting for Bucky to call him.

Bucky takes a deep, shaky breath and nods, even though Steve can’t see him yet.

“Perfect,” he repeats, and tries to believe it.

  
The florist eventually comes back and gestures at Bucky to follow her into the back of the store. He takes another deep breath and prepares to meet his maker, but it’s actually not nearly as painful as he imagined it would be. He calls Steve over Facetime, as instructed, and just seeing Steve’s reassuring, warm smile and his cute face under his cute glasses helps calm him down. They look at all of the potential arrangements together. The florist says some flower names and Steve says some flower names back and Bucky learns some things like there is a color called “blush pink” and the tiny little white flower clusters are called “Baby’s-breath” and that there is a difference between floral centerpiece arrangements and bouquets and apparently you can make a whole chandelier out of flowers if your client pays you enough.

All in all, the whole experience ranks solidly between getting zapped in the brain by one of Zola’s ray guns and the month one of his handlers was obsessed with the soundtrack to The Book of Mormon.

After they’ve picked out six different arrangements for Bucky to cart back and the florist is in the back putting them all into vases or wherever else flowers go, it’s just Bucky taking a breath of relief and Steve on Facetime, pouring himself more wine and grinning at him.

“I heard you that last round,” Steve says.

“What?”

“ _Not the geraniums_ ,” Steve says, in a poor approximation of Bucky’s voice. “ _Dahlia is too big. No one can say ranunculus._ ”

“No one _can_ say ranun...raunu...ranu…” Bucky says and frowns so deeply Steve starts laughing over the phone. “Hey.”

“Admit it,” Steve says, wiping a fake tear away from his stupidly bright blue eyes. “You had fun.”

“I hate flowers,” Bucky says.

“You’re glad you went!”

“Flowers are the worst,” Bucky says.

“You learned so much,” Steve grins.

“Ranunculus,” Bucky says, with a blank expression on his face and Steve’s grin widens, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

“There it is,” he says. For a moment Steve says nothing and the two of them kind of quietly watch each other over the phone, Steve probably trying to figure out why Bucky won’t hang up or at least use more words than a kindergartner and Bucky trying to ignore the absolute avalanche of butterflies nesting in his stomach.

“Hey,” Steve says.

Bucky worries at his lower lip and wonders how much longer the florist will be.

“Yes?”

“I like your cardigan,” Steve says. He flushes a little as he says it, probably because he’s tipsy. It literally takes one glass with him.

Bucky wrinkles his nose.

“Thanks,” he says. “It was scrunched into a ball in the back seat of my car.”

“It looks good on you,” Steve says with a smile. His eyes are definitely glassier than normal and he’s smiling a little too much, almost goofy. “Thank you, Bucky. This was a huge help.”

He sounds relaxed and happy and warm and Bucky feels that way too, for him.

He’s glad he was able to help Steve with this task.

“No problem,” Bucky replies and even returns a little smile. “That’s what an assistant is for.”

  
The florist finally returns with the selected arrangements and Bucky has to hang up on Steve. He doesn’t really want to, but he has to take everything over to Steve’s apartment after this anyway and he knows Steve will ask him in to drink a little and go through the whole thing all over again, so you know what?

Maybe it’s not the worst task he’s ever agreed to.

Bucky doesn’t think he even minds.

*

It’s his fault for being so distracted. He’s coming back from Trader Joe’s, with three paper bags of groceries in his arms, thinking about color coordinating ribbons and seat covers and, specifically, who could possibly tell the difference between _millennial pink_ and _veiled rose_. Not to sound like the 100-whatever year old man he definitely is, but back in _his_ day, there was one shade of pink someone had to know and that was pink and that was plenty. It’s because the question is so ludicrous and he’s so mad at the concept of colors that he doesn’t notice.

He’s already well into his apartment before the hairs stand up at the back of his neck and he realizes that someone has tripped all of his security measures, avoided all of his cameras, and is now standing squarely at his living room window.

Bucky’s brain buzzes in threat and luckily his reflexes are quicker than his observational skills these days, because the grocery bags are on the counter and he has his guns out faster than the man has turned around from the view.

“Relax,” Captain America says.

Bucky’s eyes narrow, his blood pounding.

“How’d you get in here?”

“I took the stairs.”

Bucky’s jaw twitches.

“How did you know where I live?”

Captain America sighs. He takes his goddamned time, as though there aren’t two fucking glocks pointed at the back of his head, and when he turns around, Sam Wilson has the goddamned _audacity_ to look amused.

“Man, you live in Brooklyn, did you think it was that hard?”

Bucky frowns, but he doesn’t lower his weapons.

“Is it Stark?” he rasps.

He’s shaking at this point, absolutely furious. Not at Wilson, who looks entertained at best, but at _himself_. Stupid as fucking shit, to be living in goddamned fucking Red Hook, just a stone’s throw away from Avenger’s HQ, and thinking he can get away with it just because he got a hair cut and his skin’s glowing from all of those Korean serums. “Does he have a tracker on me?”

“Will you put those down?” Wilson asks and this time he looks a little annoyed. Good.

“No,” Bucky says. “You’re trespassing.”

“You don’t own this building,” Wilson says. “You rent out this neat block of space for twice the going rate.”

Bucky’s eye twitches this time.

“I made modifications,” he says. “Only fair.”

“Kind of think the landlord should be paying _you_ to put in bulletproof windows, but okay.” Wilson has his beefy arms crossed at his beefy chest.

He’s wearing his stupidass red-white-and-blue Cap suit, with the red boots and the blue pants and the red-and-white stripes and the enormous white star surrounded by a blue circle in the middle of his goddamned meatslab of a torso. His red wings are folded behind him and he has on those dumb fucking goggles and that white face covering that does absolutely nothing for protection.

“You look ridiculous,” Bucky says.

“Thank you,” Wilson grins.

Bucky’s hesitant to lower his weapons, but he and Wilson have faced off more than a handful of times and, in Wilson’s defense, Bucky was the one who had shot him like three times in the stomach during the whole Triskelion fiasco. Wilson’s usually telling him to knock it the fuck off and trying to rescue him, like he’s Bucky’s own personal fucking knight, while Bucky is flipping him off and threatening his bodily integrity. The point is, the man is about two brain cells short on self preservation, most of which goes to some stupid sense of compassion and nobility that has no business being in the superhero game.

“Does Stark have a tracker on me?” Bucky repeats his question, with more heat this time.

Wilson sighs and puts up both of his hands.

“No, Barnes. Tony doesn’t have a tracker on you. Widow saw you at a flower shop in midtown and followed you back.”

Bucky scowls. Widow’s always been too good at her job by half. He supposes it’s not that hard when Bucky’s doing stupid shit like _going to midtown for an arrangement of fucking peonies._ He had known better than to get so close to Avengers HQ, had almost told Steve no, he was too busy that day, but then Steve had looked up at him with his stupidly blue eyes behind those adorable clear, plastic frames and Bucky Barnes, the former Winter fucking Soldier, had been powerless to say no.

Crushes were so fucking stupid.

Bucky sighs and slowly lowers his guns.

“What do you want?” he asks. “I’m not inviting you in for tea.”

“First of all, I’m already inside,” Wilson says, with a grin. “Second of all, I’m a coffee guy.”

“I’m going to shoot your kneecaps,” Bucky says, deadpan, which is a real threat, but which only seems to make Wilson grin more.

“All right, all right,” he says. “We need to talk.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” Bucky says. “Or to Stark. Or to Romanoff. Maybe to Banner, I have a few words for him about wandering into active gamma radiation zones.”

“I’ll pass that along,” Wilson says, scratching his nose. He sighs then and Bucky finally, reluctantly, puts his guns away. “Listen, we’ve been going around each other for years now.”

Bucky gives him an appraising look.

“Are you about to ask me out? The answer is no.”

“Boy if you don’t shut your fucking mouth for two seconds,” Wilson says in irritation, which makes Bucky grin.

Truthfully, he kind of likes Cap. He’s annoying as shit, but also really fun to annoy the shit out of and sometimes that’s a win for Bucky.

“It’s been how many years now since you quit your former day job?”

Bucky shrugs.

“Almost four years.”

“Yeah,” Wilson nods. “That sounds right. So you parted ways almost four years ago. Then there was that thing in Siberia a few years ago and now you’re, what, just hanging around Red Hook, blowing up HYDRA HQs in New Jersey?”

Bucky scratches his nose this time and shrugs.

“Don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Again, you’re not subtle, Barnes, don’t know how to break that to you,” Wilson says.

Bucky flips him off and Wilson ploughs on. His beefy arms are back at his chest again. Distantly, Bucky wonders how those things fit inside the suit. It’s a pretty skin-tight suit.

“You’re blowing up HYDRA HQs, we’re blowing up HYDRA HQs, we no longer have guns pointed at each other,” Wilson says. Bucky raises an eyebrow and Wilson amends, “Usually. We’re replicating work when we don’t have to.”

Bucky frowns at that. Now it’s his turn to cross _his_ beefy arms at _his_ beefy chest.

“What are you getting at?”

“What I’m trying to say is we have an opening,” Wilson says. “And I’m bringing you a job offer.”

Bucky just stares at him.

No, he really just stares, because there’s no way that Captain fucking America has broken into _his_ home with the idea that he would _ever_ entertain joining the goddamned Avengers. First of all, he can’t stand Tony fucking Stark. Second of all, he’s not wearing a stupid costume. Third of all—

“Can’t,” Bucky says. “Already have a job.”

Wilson frowns at him. He pushes himself off the window ledge he’s been leaning against.

“I know you don’t get paid for the HYDRA demolition work you do.”

Bucky scratches the back of his head. Well, he’s drained more than one HYDRA bank account and siphoned funds into his own offshore, but that’s not something SHIELD needs to know about.

Wilson looks confused.

“Then what—”

“I have a job,” Bucky insists. He’s about to get his guns back out and forcibly remove Cap from his premises when there’s a knock on his door. “Shit.”

Wilson looks at him questioningly.

“Since when do you get visitors?”

“Bucky?”

“ _Shit_ ,” Bucky hisses.

Wilson’s look of confusion slowly slides into a grin.

“ _Bucky_?”

“Quick, out the window!” Bucky says.

“No,” Wilson says.

Bucky glares at him.

“Buck, you home?” Steve’s voice is louder now and he’s knocking again.

“Buck?” Wilson’s grin is practically eating his stupid face. “ _Buck_?”

“If you don’t throw yourself out my fucking window _right now_ ,” Bucky’s hissing again and this time he’s in front of Wilson shoving at his shoulders, panicking.

Wilson digs his heels in and takes a breath.

“Wilson, no!” Bucky says, but it’s too late.

“Hold on, he’s just doing dishes!” Wilson says as loudly as he can.

Bucky is going to fucking _murder_ Captain America.

“Oh,” Steve says outside and Bucky can almost see him blinking. “Okay, I’ll...wait.”

“When he leaves, I’m going to take my WiFi cables and garrote you with them,” Bucky hisses, but Wilson ignores him and shoves past, a grin on his face. “What? No! Stop!”

Bucky shuffles after him, fully intending to tackle him to the ground, but before he can, Wilson’s across the living room and to the door and Bucky curses his decision to live in such a small fucking apartment.

“Hey there!” Wilson says, throwing open the door. “You must be—”

Steve looks up at him, blinking owlishly behind his frames, and Bucky curses under his breath, catching up to them both.

“Steve,” Steve says. He sharply inhales. “Steve Rogers. Aren’t you…”

Wilson grins.

“Ignore him,” Bucky all but begs. “He’s nobody. He’s an impersonator. I found him on Craigslist and hired him for a children’s birthday party.”

“You don’t know any children,” both Steve and Wilson say at the same time and the horror that creeps over Bucky could not be put into words in this lifetime.

Steve looks up at Wilson with a grin and Wilson looks down at him, with interest and an easy smile. He lifts his dumb fucking goggles to the top of his head, presumably so he can get a better look.

“Sam Wilson,” he says and sticks out his hand.

“Nice to meet you, Sam,” Steve says, taking this all in stride and shaking his hand. Well, he seems to be taking this all in stride, except then he looks up at Bucky and says, calmly, “Hey, Buck. Why do you know Captain America?”

“Wish I didn’t know him,” Bucky mutters under his breath.

“What was that?”

“Uh,” Bucky says. “I met him in...D.C.”

“I didn’t know you were in D.C.,” Steve says. He lets go of Sam’s hand and turns toward Bucky.

Bucky knows there’s a hundred things happening now that he has to personally control if he doesn’t want his entire life to go up in flames, but he can’t help but take the moment to note how cute Steve looks, with his skinny jeans with the rips at the knees and his teal Converses, a soft, loose grey t-shirt that has a tiny pocket, and an enormous, slouchy teal sweater that’s hanging off of his shoulders. When Steve’s not dressed to the nines like a fucking wedding professional, he wears things that are so large they make him look twice as small as he is and it literally drives Bucky insane because all he wants to do is scoop him up and put him in his pocket.

Or something that doesn’t make him seem like an enormous fucking weirdo.

Bucky barely bites back his grin.

“I was passing through,” he says.

“Yup,” Wilson says and then suddenly, before Bucky can stop him or stab him in the ribs with one of his hidden knives, Wilson’s arm is around his shoulder. “We’ve been friends ever since. I like to check up on him time to time. Make sure he’s eating his vegetables, washing behind his ears, being safe on the dating websites, etcetera.”

Steve looks taken aback and Bucky flushes scarlet. He manages to elbow Wilson painfully in the side, but the fucking jackass just ignores it, beaming at them both.

“Steve,” Bucky says, nearly begging again. “There something you need?”

Steve looks between Bucky and Wilson dubiously before clearing his throat.

“Right, yes,” he says. “Um, if you’re busy that’s okay and I’m sorry to ask, but uh, if you’re _not_ busy this afternoon, could you come cake tasting with me?”

Bucky feels Wilson slowly turn his head to look at him. Bucky suppresses a sigh.

“I know it’s your day off and I keep doing this to you, but I think I have wedding cake taste blindness now,” Steve says. “Taste...ness. Whatever. I’ve had so many of them I can’t tell the difference between French vanilla and vanilla bean anymore and I’m trying to bring on a new contract and I’m pretty sure they’re the right call, but I don’t trust my taste buds and brides are—oh my god, if you think they’re particular about flowers, I don’t have to tell you what they’ll do to us if we fuck up their cake. The CIA couldn’t take out a Long Island bride who gets Devil’s food cake instead of Black forest. So I thought—if you wouldn’t mind—”

“I don’t,” Bucky says quickly. He ignores the way Wilson’s eyes bug out of his stupid head. “I like cake.”

“We’ll add it onto your hours!” Steve says in a rush, clearly relieved. “And cake tasting is pretty fun, although you get sick of buttercream pretty fast, but since this is your first time I don’t think it’ll be too bad and we can rank them and make a fun game out of them and—”

“Steve,” Bucky says, interrupting. “It’s okay. I’m happy to taste cakes with you. I have a sweet tooth.”

Steve gives him that grin that takes over his entire face and Bucky’s not certain that Wilson, still with his fucking arm around him, doesn’t feel the way Bucky goes weak in the knees for it.

“Oh, great!” Steve says. He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and is almost pink with relief. “Okay, well. Thank you. Meet at my place in an hour?”

“Yup,” Bucky says. “I’ll be there.”

“It was so nice to meet you, Cap,” Steve says, with a grin. “Maybe next time you check in with Bucky, we can all go get drinks or something. I’m just down the hall.”

Bucky’s sigh isn’t audible, but that isn’t to say his non-verbal queues aren’t loud enough to be heard in Yonkers.

“Oh no,” Wilson says. “The pleasure was _all_ mine, Steve. Will definitely take you up on the drinks next time.”

“There’s not going to be a next time after I garrote you,” Bucky turns his head and hisses into Wilson’s ear.

Wilson just grins wider.

“An hour, Buck!” Steve says, waving at them both and making his way down the corridor.

Bucky closes the door.

There’s a beat of pure silence between him and Wilson.

Then Wilson says, cracking up, “ _Is the Winter Soldier a wedding planner?_ ” and Bucky goes for his knives.

“ _I’m going to murder you!_ ” Bucky yells.

Wilson scrambles over his couch. He has the window pane up and is shoving his body through, still cackling, as Bucky unsheathes two of his favorite daggers and sends them flying out the window after him.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm OBSESSED with Captain America Sam Wilson and I hope the rest of you are too!!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It turns out that they’re facing an invitation disaster. 
> 
> “Three hundred invitations,” Steve says. He’s sitting cross-legged on Bucky’s couch, and there’s a pile of invitations, a pile of envelopes, two sets of gel pens, a box of calligraphy pens, and about 400 stamps spread out across Bucky’s coffee table.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy We're-Halfway-Through-the-Work-Week-Thank-God! As ever, thank you so much for your enthusiasm for this fic and your kind words! I'm having a blast reading your reactions to everything. 
> 
> If you will remember, Bucky and Steve are about to go cake tasting. That can only mean [sugar intensifies]. :)

Bucky wasn’t lying. He really does have a sweet tooth.

The two of them are seated at a tiny table in a tiny Brooklyn bakery called Hummingbird Cakes. The walls are mostly white, with dainty blue and purple flowers painted at the end of delicately drawn golden stems and little hummingbirds sticking their beaks into the petals. It’s quaint, it’s sweet, it’s quintessentially Brooklyn.

There’s about seven plates of cake slices crowding the little metal table between them.

“Okay, from left to right, around the table,” the baker—a woman with dark, curly hair and gold-rimmed glasses, says. “You have your classic red velvet with cream cheese frosting, German chocolate, Black forest with chocolate ganache, lemon cake with blueberry compote and lemon buttercream, carrot cake with cream cheese, passion fruit cake with raspberry filling and vanilla buttercream, and French vanilla cake with vanilla bean buttercream.”

Steve gives Bucky a triumphant sort of look and Bucky has the absurd urge to giggle. He does not do that, but he does give Steve a wry sort of smile.

“We have a variety of flavors that are off-the-beaten path too, if you’re interested,” the baker says. “Including a whole rainbow cake that gets a lot of mileage during Pride.”

Steve ends up grinning at that.

“Maybe for my birthday,” he says, which Bucky finds interesting, for no particular reason.

“I’ll hold you to that.”

The baker smiles and Steve beams up at her.

“Thank you, we’re excited to eat our way through all of this!”

“I’ll put coffee on the pot,” the baker says, with a knowing twitch of her lips. “To bring you both...back down.”

“You’re an angel,” Steve says.

She laughs. “If you have any questions, I’ll be behind the counter.”

After she disappears, Bucky and Steve stare at one another and then stare down at the immense amount of wedding cake in front of them. They both straighten, seeming to square off against a common enemy: impending sugar rush.

“You used to do this by yourself?” Bucky asks.

“Yes,” Steve says.

“But you’re.” Bucky stares at him, as though to say, without saying, _you know. Tiny._

Steve nods.

“I know.”

Bucky nods in return, as though this makes sense.

Steve takes a deep breath.

“This is a lot of cake.”

Bucky nods again, sitting up even straighter.

“It is.”

  
“Are you up to the task?” Steve asks, leaning toward him as much as he can without getting frosting on his sleeves. “Will you, Bucky Barnes, wedding planning assistant, help me eat an entire table of cake? Compare flavors. List them. Categorize them. Rank them.”

Bucky takes a deep breath.

“I will,” he says. “I’ll do it.”

Steve nods solemnly and picks up a fork. Bucky mirrors him and for a moment, they stare, bug-eyed, at their selection.

“This is it,” Steve says. “Your Mount Cake Saint Everest.”

“I don’t think Mount Everest is a Saint,” Bucky comments. “But I understand your point.”

Steve nods approvingly and gives him a little fork salute.

“Okay,” he says, taking a fortifying breath. “Let’s get this out of the way.”

Then he reaches for the French vanilla cake with the vanilla buttercream frosting and scoops up a forkful.

  
It’s fucking delicious is what it is.

Bucky really does have an insatiable sweet tooth and he’s only too happy to eat his way across the table. It really takes more alcohol than is reasonable to make even the slightest dent in him, but by their fourth slice of pure sugar, he’s starting to feel a little loopy. His mouth tastes like it’s coated in three layers of frosting and every time he swallows another bite of cake, the sweetness lingers at the back of his throat. There’s a warmth spreading across his chest as a result of the sugar rush, a lightness in his head, a goofy expression that he can’t keep off his face. He keeps laughing—a little too loud—at whatever Steve is saying and Steve is nudging him under the table and Bucky is teasing him back and he feels like he has little bubbles under his skin, so light he could nearly float away on the feeling.

He’s giddy, is what he is. Bucky Barnes is _giddy_.

“I don’t know,” Steve is saying, screwing up his face, a little pink around the edges. “The lemon and blueberry over the Black forest?”

“Lemon and blueberry are classic flavors, Steve,” Bucky argues.

They’ve been arguing for at least ten minutes and through three different slices of cake. It’s taken Bucky seven decades to form an opinion on modern politics, but cake apparently brings out his inner fire sign. It’s funny because Bucky is a water sign. Anyway.

“Black forest is literally a chocolate sponge with _cherry_ filling. What’s more classic than chocolate and cherries?” Steve says, loudly.

“Literally anything,” Bucky replies.

“Chocolate and...pear,” Steve says.

“Yes,” Bucky says.

“Almond and grapefruit.” Steve’s eyes narrow.

“Classic,” Bucky says, deadpan.

“Vanilla and...salmon,” Steve says triumphantly, leaning toward Bucky.

“Yum,” Bucky grins at him and Steve groans loudly.

“You’re the worst!”

Bucky’s grin widens and he takes another forkful of the lemon and blueberry. It’s easily his favorite.

“Anyway, if you have to say sponge when you’re talking about a cake, then it can’t be classic.”

“That’s not a rule,” Steve says, waving his fork around. “Everyone says sponge. Do you even watch the Great British Bake Off?”

“No,” Bucky says, swallowing a mouth full of blueberry compote. “The peaceful music makes me want to stab something.”

Steve just stares at him.

“You are literally so weird.”

Bucky’s cheeks warm and he can’t help the smitten, flattered smile that spills out over his face.

“Takes one to know one,” he shoots back.

“Are you _victim blaming me_?” Steve says in mock outrage, waving his fork around even more.

His eyes are gleaming too-brightly, his cheeks also pink. Bucky’s not the only one suffering from spiking glucose levels. It’s _really_ fucking cute. Like. Cuter than usual. Like so cute, Bucky’s about one bite of cream cheese frosting away from doing something really stupid like imploding into confetti or leaning across the table and kissing the sugar off of Steve’s lips.

He would like to do that very, very much, but also he’s suffering from a sugar high, not lost all semblance of his mind. Luckily, he’s rescued from doing anything stupid by the baker, who brings them two huge mugs of black coffee.

“You two are having fun,” she says.

“The sugar is kicking in,” Steve says wisely.

“The sugar kicked in...seventeen slices ago,” Bucky says. He really is getting loopy.

“I love it when that happens,” the baker says, with a grin. “Really helps me out. What’s your favorite?”

“Lemon and blueberry,” Bucky says.

“Red velvet!” Steve exclaims.

“Both very good choices,” she says, looking pleased. She hands each of them their coffee.

Steve and Bucky kick each other under the table, grinning widely in response, like two fucking hyperactive school children. They thank her profusely and take huge gulps of their coffees after she steps away, as palate cleansers.

  
It’s not really the sugar, obviously. If alcohol isn’t going to make a drunk out of Bucky Barnes, then a couple of slices of wedding cake aren’t going to actually do him in. It’s the atmosphere between them, the jokes and the jostling and the sweet looks exchanged between peals of laughter. Bucky has been the Winter Soldier for so long, has been alone for so long, he’s forgotten what this is like—having a friend to laugh and spend his time with.

Because that’s what Steve has become, of course. Sure, he’s Bucky’s boss, and of course he’s Bucky’s embarrassingly huge crush, but above all, Steve Rogers has become Bucky’s closest—and only—friend.

Bucky smiles over his mug. He likes that for himself.

It makes him feel, for a moment, almost normal.

Steve takes a fork full of the passion fruit layer cake, with its raspberry filling and light pink, vanilla frosting. He’s so distracted by smirking at Bucky, he doesn’t notice that he gets frosting on his nose.

Bucky could leave well enough alone. He could point out the frosting to Steve and offer a napkin. He does neither of these things.

Instead, like a complete psychopath, he leans forward and brushes his thumb over Steve’s nose.

Steve’s blue eyes go wide at that and he lets out a little “ _Oh!_ ” of surprise. His cheeks color spectacularly, which makes something go gooey in Bucky’s stomach.

“Frosting,” Bucky says and unthinkingly sucks it off his thumb.

Steve watches him, turning pinker for some reason, and Bucky grins, all fluttery and goopy and pleased.

“How is it?” Steve asks, after a moment. He wipes his nose with the back of his hand and looks at Bucky expectantly, as though truly waiting for the answer.

Bucky swallows and smiles brightly.

“Delicious,” he says.

*

He’s climbing in through his fourth story window in a real fucking state. He would have used the front door, but, well, the blood-soaked pants would have been difficult to explain, to say nothing of the knife slashes running through his leather vest, which is hanging open in flaps, the bullet wound leaking just above his left hip, and the blood crusted at his jaw and right cheekbone. Bucky hasn’t looked in a mirror, just got a flash of himself in the reflective shine of a car, but he knows it isn’t _pretty_.

He had ripped the bullet out with his own metal fingers and, to his body’s credit, the gorey wound is already healing, but it’s a lot of blood to explain for someone whose employment records show him working for an event planning company.

Bucky hisses in pain as he jacks up his window from the outside and, using his body strength, hoists himself up and over the window ledge. He lies sprawled on the floor for exactly fifteen seconds, trying to catch his breath and, momentarily, stop his head from spinning. It’s not too bad, really. It’s just, you know, taking a slug to the body and various knife wounds while dodging a hive of HYDRA operatives dropping explosives through drone warfare takes a beat to recover from.

Overall, Bucky would say the whole situation had been a success. Sure, Bucky’s a bit battered and one of the drones had gotten caught on Cap’s wing and dragged him across three different roofs before dropping him from a twenty story building and okay, Hawkeye isn’t going to be crawling into high spaces for a while with that leg injury, but no one had died and Stark had been forced to ground like three of his suits. That had been pretty funny.

After Bucky had single handedly destroyed five different murder drones and thrown four different operatives off of the highest building in Bay Ridge, the Widow had caught up to him. She had a gash across her forehead and seemed winded, but otherwise she was too fucking good to take injury even on a mission that had clearly gone a bit belly up. She had watched one of the operatives scream as he was unceremoniously dumped from the same twenty story building Cap had taken a less fatal plunge from ten minutes ago, and looked almost impressed.

“You know,” the Widow said and Bucky gave her the look of the dead.

“No,” he said.

“You could at least consider it,” the Widow said, tucking a red curl behind her ear.

“I told the other one,” Bucky said, grunting and jerking his head in the general direction of the idiot in the star-spangled suit. “I already have a job.”

The Widow grinned at him and Bucky scowled at her, menacingly. Usually that kind of thing worked, but her grin just softened at the edges, as though she found the display endearing.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “Sam told me all about it.”

“Fucking Wilson,” Bucky replied. He stalked across the roof, picking up HYDRA weapons and folding them in on themselves.

“That’s part-time,” she said, following him. “What do you do with the other part?”

“Relax,” Bucky said. He stared her straight in her bright green eyes and bent a rifle in half. “Watch TV. I have hobbies.”

The Widow folded her arms across her chest, looking amused.

“The Winter Soldier watches TV?”

“I’m on Season 2 of The Expanse and it’s finally starting to make sense,” Bucky said, with a growl. That was a lie. That show made no sense whatsoever. “Don’t take that from me.”

The Widow almost looked as though she was going to laugh.

“You really should talk to Sam more,” she offered.

“Absolutely not,” Bucky said and dumped all of the now-useless weaponry in the corner of the roof. “Does SHIELD have disposal services?”

The Widow nodded at the pile.

“We’ll take care of it.”

Bucky grunted and headed toward the stairs down from the roof. He assumed the Widow would take the hint, but she was as obstinate as the rest of her comrades. Goddamned fucking annoying as shit superheroes.

“Consider it, Barnes,” she said, reaching across the doorway to stop him. She was one fourth of his size and he could literally lift her entire body with a single bicep, but he knew better than to fuck with her.

He glared at her, instead.

“No,” he said.

“It’s a good offer,” she said. “You’re good at what you do without any of the moral hang ups of some of the others. We could use a guy like you on our team.”

“Are you insulting my ethics or your team’s?” Bucky wondered out loud.

The Widow just grinned.

He sighed.

“If I say maybe, will you let me go? I’m bleeding out from this fucking gunshot wound and I have to learn macrame tomorrow.”

The Widow searched his face and after finding whatever it was that a former Russian spy seeks to find in the man who had tried to shoot her out years ago, relents.

“Interesting,” she said.

Bucky frowned at that.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said and patted his shoulder. “Enjoy your macrame. Consider our offer. And get that looked at.”

Her head jerked down to his bloodied hip and he had grit his teeth and saluted her before disappearing into the stairwell.

  
Anyway, so he’s processing all of that while trying to let his body soak up all of the pain he’s been ignoring for the past two hours when his phone rings.

“Hi,” he says, answering it without even bothering to look at the caller ID.

“Okay, incoming in two minutes!” Steve says. He sounds excitable and stressed and a little out of breath.

Bucky’s brain doesn’t work.

“What?” he says dumbly.

“Two minutes, Bucky Barnes!” Steve says loudly. The sound is a little echoey, so Bucky frowns.

“Do you have me on speaker phone?”

“Yes!” Steve says. “My arms are full of—well, you’ll see. A minute and a half now! Don’t worry, I’ll bring wine and the take out’s on me.”

Bucky’s brain wastes five more seconds trying to figure out what Steve’s saying. Then he bolts upright with realization. _Shit!_

He makes it to the bathroom and strips out of his ruined clothes, throws them into the laundry basket to throw out later, and shoves himself into a shower as his front door bangs open.

“Okay!” Steve shouts. “I’m here! With invitations!”

Bucky groans as he turns on the water as hot it will go.

“Shower!” Bucky shouts back. “Give me five!”

There’s a few seconds of silence wherein Steve is probably dumping things onto Bucky’s kitchen table and Bucky is hoping desperately that he didn’t track blood stains into his living room.

“Okay!” Steve shouts back. “I’ll open the wine!”

Bucky shakes his head. He gets himself lathered up with soap pretty quickly, wincing as his wounds make the water run red and brown with blood and dirt. It feels great, but he doesn’t have time to savor any of it. He turns the water off as soon as he’s all clean, scrubs a towel through his hair, slings another one around his waist—hiding the healing bullet wound—and walks out into the hallway.

Steve looks up from the living room at the noise. He’s sitting on the couch and twists his head back.

“Hey!” he says and then his eyes go wide, his voice dying in his throat.

Bucky nods at him.

“Give me a second to dress,” he says. Then, with a grin, he nods at Steve. “Pour me a glass.”

Steve tries to say something that comes out somewhere between a chirp and a squeak.

“You okay?” Bucky blinks at him in slight concern.

Steve coughs and nods his head vigorously.

“Okay, yeah, sure, fine, wine, got it,” Bucky hears Steve mutter as Bucky turns toward his bedroom.

For a moment he thinks he sees a pink blush spread across Steve’s cheeks, but Bucky doesn’t pay enough attention to be sure, and then he’s disappeared inside to pull on clean clothes.

  
It turns out that they’re facing an invitation disaster.

“Three hundred invitations,” Steve says. He’s sitting cross-legged on Bucky’s couch, and there’s a pile of invitations, a pile of envelopes, two sets of gel pens, a box of calligraphy pens, and about 400 stamps spread out across Bucky’s coffee table.

He has a half-full glass of wine in his hand and Bucky has a matching one. They’re facing each other, game faces on.

“How the fuck did they get fucked up?” Bucky says. He pauses. “Sorry for the language.”

“How the fuck _did_ they get fucked up?” Steve agrees, with a heated nod. He drinks deeply and the wine stains his mouth purple. “How do you, the owner of an entire invitation making business, whose entire job is to _make invitations_ get the _goddamned bride and groom’s name wrong?_ ”

Bucky picks up one of the invitations and looks at it. It’s all gold and glitter on a background of glossy, eggshell white and it says: _You are invited to the wedding of Triscuit Brown and Pantaloons Monsen_.

“You mean their names aren’t—” his mouth twitches. “Triscuit and Pantaloons?”

“The future Trisha and Antoine Brown-Monsen are not, in fact, named Triscuit and Pantaloons.”

Bucky giggles into his wine.

Steve tries to keep the grin off his face.

“This is very serious, Buck,” he says. “This is an _emergency_.”

“Yes, of course,” Bucky says, straightening his face and his shoulders. “An invitation crisis.”

“We have to get these in the mail no later than tomorrow or the bride is going to flip her shit,” Steve says. “So for the next—” he looks at his watch and then shakes his head. “—however long it takes, it’s just you, me, Triscuit, and Pantaloons. How’s your penmanship?”

Bucky supposes Steve doesn’t mean how quickly can he kill a man with a pen because the answer to _that_ is _excellent_.

“Passable,” he says.

“Passable will have to be enough for Mr. and Mrs. Triscuit,” Steve says. He puts his wine glass down and opens up the calligraphy set. “I have calligraphy skills, so I’ll fix the inside of the invitations and you take the envelopes. The list of addresses is—over there, under that pile.”

Bucky finds it and pales as he looks through all 300 names. For the first time in 70 years, he wishes he was left-handed.

“What do you want for dinner?” Steve asks.

“Noodles?” Bucky says, questioningly, and Steve brightens. Steve loves anything he can wrap around a fork, as Bucky’s learned over the last few months.

“I’ll order our usual.”

Steve pulls out the Uber Eats app on his phone and Bucky tries not to let that fill him with an unreasonable amount of goofy happiness. _Our_ usual, Steve says, and Bucky supposes he’s right. They’ve spent enough nights taking care of wedding tasks and emergencies by now that they have a set order saved to Steve’s phone at a variety of restaurants in Red Hook. He looks over Steve’s shoulder and sees him pull up their (their!) favorite Thai place.

The order is already pre-set from last time: one chicken Pad Thai, one beef Pad See Ew, a chicken and basil fried rice, one order of spring rolls, two orders of fried tofu, one chicken satay, a large papaya salad, and two large Thai iced bubble teas.

“Except,” Steve pauses and looks up at Bucky with a little glare. “I’m going to order _two_ orders of spring rolls this time.”

Bucky gives him an abashed grin. Maybe he had eaten Steve’s share last time, but in his defense, Steve had been distracted with ribbons and Bucky had been hungry.

“Sent,” Steve says after a moment and then uncaps his pen.

He looks up at Bucky and gives him a firm, stern nod. “All right, Comrade. And now, we label.”

  
They’re a good, hardworking team. They work in comfortable silence for a while, Steve doing ridiculous calligraphy on each invitation and Bucky trying to make sure his handwriting is legible enough that the postman won’t just dump the envelopes into the nearest body of water.

It’s slow, tedious work and Bucky gets bored of addressing them after the first thirty and switches to putting on the stamps.

“Where are you mailing yourself to?” Steve says after a little while, looking up at him with a grin.

“What?” Bucky blinks.

Steve’s grin widens and he peels a stamp from Bucky’s nose.

“Oh.”

“I think you’re going to need a lot more than one,” Steve says.

“That depends on where I’m going,” Bucky says. He takes the stamp and puts it on an envelope and pauses, thoughtfully. “How many stamps to get to Antarctica?”

“Maybe you can just set yourself adrift on an iceberg,” Steve suggests, leaning forward to correct an invitation.

“Hm, maybe,” Bucky says. “But I don’t think they have those anymore.”

“Icebergs?” Steve says, confused.

“Don’t be a climate change denier, Steve,” Bucky says and presses another stamp in place. “That’s not hot. But the planet is.”

Steve makes an aggressive face at him and shoves at his shoulder. Bucky snickers, pleased, and returns to his stamps.

It’s slightly less tedious after that.

  
Eventually, Bucky gets bored of the silence too.

He pulls up his phone to turn on music in the background and spends ten minutes fighting with Steve over the merits of an 80s vs 90s Spotify playlist. Steve is pro-90s pop music and Bucky has to find a way to advocate for the 80s without letting Steve know that the only song he had managed to pick up from the 90s was _Welcome to Miami_ by Will Smith. They eventually compromise for a playlist of Disney soundtracks and Bucky has to rub his ears as Steve sings to the entirety of Mulan very, very off-key.

“Steve,” Bucky says, very seriously. “You suck.”

Steve flips him off and sings _I’ll Make a Man out of You_ even louder, until Bucky’s next-door neighbor bangs on their shared wall to get him to shut up.

Steve looks put out and Bucky just snickers. He ruffles Steve’s hair and Steve makes a face at him. It’s practically domestic.

To soothe Steve’s feelings, Bucky scrolls through the playlist to _Prince Ali_ and tells Steve that as long as he’s not screeching, he will allow him to sing this song.

“You’re not the boss of me,” Steve says, sticking a finger in Bucky’s chest. “I’m the boss of you.”

Bucky smirks at him and waves his phone a little, as though to indicate _maybe, but I’m the President of Spotify_ , but then Genie starts singing and Steve’s distracted by the first _Make way, for Prince Ali!_ anyway.

Eventually, after another semi-painful karaoke round, they settle back down. They redo more invitations and address more envelopes, this time with Phil Collins crooning dramatically at them both.

  
Their food eventually comes in and they take another break. It’s just as well because Bucky’s good wrist is getting cramped and Steve has calligraphy marker on his nose.

“I’m starving,” Steve declares, putting his pens neatly back into the wooden box.

“I’m going to eat all of the food,” Bucky says, agreeing. “I’ll leave you a peanut.”

“If you don’t think I can kill you with a calligraphy pen,” Steve says, in response. “You’re wrong.”

Bucky grins at that. See? Penmanship.

They divide up the cartons of food and relax, Bucky cross-legged on the floor next to his mountain of stamps and Steve with his legs curled under him on the couch. They talk and laugh and bitching about uncontrollable bridezillas and venues that force you to cater from their own premises, the merits of veils versus tiaras and the useless, billion dollar wedding industry, in between mouthfuls of Thai noodles and the rest of Steve’s wine.

Bucky learns that Steve _has_ thought of his dream wedding, although Steve won’t tell him a single detail about it. Steve, in turn, learns that Bucky has not worn a tuxedo in the last five years.

“Are you _serious_?,” he demands.

Bucky shrugs.

“Never had an opportunity to.”

Steve gulps down the last mouthfuls of his wine and shakes his head vigorously.

“That is a damned shame,” he says, his words a little slurred.

“Why’s that?” Bucky grins. He leans forward and steals a piece of fried tofu that Steve is clearly eyeing.

“Hey!” Steve swats at him and Bucky swallows aggressively on purpose.

“Why’s it a shame, Steve?” Bucky prompts again.

“Your shoulders in a tuxedo,” Steve says and makes a little noise. Bucky’s not sure what that means, but he flushes a little with pleasure, warms with it too.

Steve is maybe too tipsy to elaborate, but he just shakes his head again and repeats, “A damned shame.”

  
Steve tries to be slick and steal a spring roll from Bucky’s stash, as though Bucky isn’t literally conditioned in hypervigilance tactics and Bucky flicks him in the nose with his chopsticks for his admittedly lame efforts.

“You got your own order, Rogers!” Bucky says loudly, and Steve whines _But Buck, I finished all of mine_. Bucky refuses, but Steve just tugs on his sleeves and badgers Bucky until Bucky rolls his eyes and, with a grievous sigh, hands over his last one.

Steve grins and stuffs it into his mouth all in one go and Bucky covers his face and laughs.

  
They return to the task at hand like two men facing the blade of the guillotine. Bitching is the only way to survive an execution by gold-rimmed envelopes, so they do that while systematically and methodically, with somewhat delirious cheer and way too much drink, work their way through 300 wedding invitations.

It takes them until nearly four in the morning to finish, but they make it and when they’re standing up, both a little punch-drunk, both definitely delirious, surveying their mountains of handiwork, Steve leaves against Bucky and sighs happily.

“You’re welcome, Mr. and Mr. Pantaloons,” he says.

Bucky does turn and giggle a little into Steve’s hair. Steve’s head comes up to Bucky’s shoulder, so it’s a bit of a bend down, but Bucky manages and it feels natural to do so anyway. Maybe he’s past delirium, he really doesn’t know.

“I don’t think any of that is right,” Bucky says, grinning.

“I hope it is,” Steve replies.

He turns to Bucky, very serious. “I’m pretty sure that’s how I addressed the last fifty of them.”

*

There are, at the heart of it, a handful of reasons Bucky keeps saying no to an incessant job offer that comes with highly sought healthcare benefits: 1) he’s a supersoldier with rapidly regenerative abilities, what can proper healthcare do for him that two straight shots of vodka, a sterilized scalpel, some gauze, and some topical ointments can’t?; 2) he thinks both individual and team uniforms are stupid and he will scale the 100-story ugly, eyesore of a glass homage to Tony Stark’s ego in the middle of Manhattan and then proceed to hurl himself off the side of the building before he lets someone else choose colors for him to wear; 3) he refuses to be caught dead by the paparazzo going into said 100-story ugly, eyesore of a glass homage to Tony Stark’s ego; 4) he refuses to be caught dead in the middle of fan-created content that contemplates a romantic and/or sexual relationship between him and any—literally any—well, perhaps other than the Widow—Avenger; and 5) he doesn’t play well in group settings.

For example:

“I told you to go left!” Cap shouts at him as he gasps and hurls himself out of the way of a hive of murderous, robot bees.

“I didn’t ask for your instructions!” Bucky yells back. He hops across one rooftop, ducks some kind of radioactive flying laser disk that the murder hive sends at him, and then takes a deep breath and hurls himself off the building.

It’s a seven story apartment building in Jersey City, so it’s not really a terrible landing. He does let out a little _oof_ as he lands in a squat and rolls to the side. To his right, there’s a loud screech, a thump, a loud blast, and the most annoying laughter he has personally _ever_ heard.

“Ha!” Stark says, through his dumb, iron mask. “Another one for me. That makes—twelve, I think. Does it make twelve? FRIDAY, how many am I on?”

Bucky rolls up to his feet and rubs his hand across his nose.

“I. Already told you,” he grits out. “I’m not competing with you.”

“What do you mean you’re not competing with me?” Stark says, turning his dumb metal face to look at Bucky. “I said to you, Barnes, let’s make this fun, what if we held a competition to welcome you to your new position and you said to me—well you didn’t really say anything, but you grunted! You didn’t specify what manner of grunt it was, so I interpreted it in the way that benefits me the most. Maybe next time you should be clearer.”

Bucky glares at him and considers picking up Stark, suit and all, and simply throwing him into the robot murder hive.

Wilson rolls over from a few yards away and shoves himself to his feet, panting.

“Don’t,” Wilson says, as though reading his mind. “Too much paperwork.”

“What do I care?” Bucky says. “I don’t work for you.”

“Incoming!” Stark yells and gets his blasters up.

Bucky grits out a curse, wondering how he had gotten himself into this situation to begin with. He had come to Jersey City because he had hacked into a poorly protected HYDRA database and picked up plans for something called Project Bumble, which was, evidently, _unrelated_ to the dating app. The Avengers had shown up approximately five minutes later, a murder hive had fallen out of the sky, and now there were robot bees with vibranium stingers and deadly laser discs and Tony Stark talking out of his mouth like he’ll personally die if he has to suffer through more than ten seconds of consecutive silence.

Bucky runs in one direction, while Wilson runs in the other.

“Behind!” Wilson shouts and Bucky ignores Stark blasting direct hits to the hive to see what Cap’s yelling about.

He’s right, there’s some crazed HYDRA operative with glowing eyes, climbing up the back of the murder hive.

“For fuck’s sake,” Bucky mutters.

Wilson takes out his guns and nods at Bucky across the field. Bucky swallows a sigh and nods back.

“This doesn’t mean I’m taking the job offer!” Bucky yells back at him and starts running.

  
When all is said and done, there’s just dead, robot bee carcasses _everywhere_. It’s kind of weird, but he supposes it would have been worse if they had been real or like, worms. Fucking worms.

Wilson unearths a bottle of water and pitches it to Bucky, who catches it with a nod of thanks. He opens it and drains it in two swallows, before crushing the plastic and dumping it into the nearest recycling bin.

“Not bad, Buckingham,” Stark says, landing next to him and folding his iron face shield up. “I thought you didn’t play well.”

“I don’t,” Bucky says. “And don’t call me that.”

Stark surveys the damage with a thoughtful expression on his face. Bucky isn’t interested. He has no desire to hear Stark formulate whatever it is that is running through that manic head of his. He’s tired, he’s dirty, and he’s going to be late for the season premiere of Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

“You know,” Stark says.

“Nope,” Bucky says and turns on the heels of his combat boots. “I’m out.”

“Come on!” Stark says.

Bucky gives Wilson—who’s watching them with a bemused expression—a nod and sets out to find his motorcycle.

“Hear me out, Bucktail—” Stark says, following on his heels.

Bucky whirls around and grabs Stark by the shoulders.

“If you say one more word,” Bucky says, “I will take your trash can suit and literally drop you into the Hudson River.”

“That’s fine,” Stark says, his face lighting up. “This is actually good timing, I’ve been testing underwater capabilities on the suit and it’s not fully ready yet, but this would present an excellent opportunity to—”

“Ugh!” Bucky says and shoves Stark away from him.

“It’s a good job offer!” Stark insists. “Good pay, decent benefits—I’ll even design your own floor at the Tower! What kind of personal touches do you like? I’m thinking blackout curtains and chains on the walls...wait, is that too much like a sex dungeon…”

Stark’s life is saved by the virtue of Bucky’s phone ringing.

Bucky glares at him anyway, fishes his phone out of his vest, and answers.

“Hello?”

Stark is watching Bucky closely, his stupid goatee face immediately intrigued.

“Uh huh,” Bucky says. “Yes.”

Next to him, Wilson’s eyebrow goes up.

“Yup,” Bucky says, narrowing his eyes at the two idiots across from him. “That’s fine. I know how to use a camera, Steve.”

 _Oh_ , Wilson mouths quietly and immediately Stark is next to him, whispering, “Steve? Who’s Steve? Wilson, why does Barnes know someone named Steve? Should _we_ know someone named Steve?”

“Don’t apologize,” Bucky says, ignoring them. “I was just finishing up at my other gig. It’s no problem.”

Stark starts windmilling his arms to try and get Bucky’s attention and Bucky digs into his jacket with his free hand, pulls out a dagger, and throws it straight at Stark’s head.

Stark yelps and dodges.

“No, just a cat,” Bucky says, staring dispassionately as Stark goes sprawling across the ground. “Send me the address? I can be there in an hour. Hour and a half? Just gotta shower and change.”

Stark sits up and picks up the dagger, waving it in the air triumphantly. Bucky looks him straight in the eyes, and digs out another.

Stark’s eyes go wide and Wilson sighs, holding out a hand to Stark to make him hand over the weapon. Stark pouts. Bucky wonders if he can get both of them with one knife.

“Okay, cool,” Bucky says. Then, he can’t help himself, he grins a little. “That a promise?”

Stark and Wilson freeze, both turning their heads to stare at him. Stark’s eyes are bugging out and Wilson mouths at him _wooooow_.

Bucky slowly and precisely, with a horrible smile that comes from the bottom of his cold, dead heart, sticks up his middle finger at them.

“Yes, Steve, I’m sure,” he says, casually. “It’ll be fine. How hard can it be to be a wedding photographer?”

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That was a fun chapter for me, personally. Maybe not for Tony Stark's head or Mr. and Mrs. Pantaloons, but for me definitely. :')


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bucky can’t help but take the moment to smile, a small glow of warmth expanding in his chest. He thinks: he’s happy, and he can’t remember the last time he allowed himself to feel such a thing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I apparently set the shenanigans expectations TOO HIGH for a wedding photographer, but I think....you will enjoy what happens anyway. I will send you all to your weekends with some big, soft feelings and just a bit of cheese. :')

“Bucky, thank _god_ ,” Steve gasps, the second he sees him hovering awkwardly by the venue door. He crosses half the floor and grabs Bucky by the elbow. For someone whose entire body mass probably weighs only slightly less than Bucky’s metal arm, he sure does have an ironclad fucking grip.

“What’s going on?” Bucky asks, a little bewildered. All Steve had said, in an admittedly harried voice, over the phone was that he needed Bucky to cover for the wedding photographer.

“Ugh, wedding disaster!” Steve exclaims, a bit frantically. He’s in a nice, dark navy suit, with a nice, nondescript silver tie and shiny black shoes. His blond hair is slicked and combed over and although he has a distinct case of the crazy eyes, Bucky can’t help but notice how nicely everything fits, and how handsome he looks.

That is before Steve turns and Bucky sees it.

Good lord, someone has given Steve Rogers an earpiece.

Someone’s squawking into Steve’s ear and Steve mutters instructions so quickly Bucky’s not entirely sure he used real words to do it.

“Steve?” Bucky ventures and Steve’s eyes snap back to him. He grasps Bucky’s elbow again and wheels him across the nicely decorated reception room.

“The wedding photographer bailed. Okay, it wasn’t really bailing so much as he had a family emergency in the middle of the ceremony, but he took all of the pictures he could and then cornered me and said he had to take off, he literally could not stay a minute longer, and I’d be refunded half of the rate, which is fine except now we have an entire reception to film and take pictures of and no wedding photographer and this bride is what we would call a Long Island Bridezilla and Bucky if every single minute of this horrid reception isn’t documented, I really think she might climb up my fire escape and murder me in my sleep.”

Steve’s eyes are bugging out and Bucky’s getting sensory overload from, well, Steve’s frantic, panicked energy, so Bucky stops Steve, just gets both of his hands onto Steve’s tiny shoulders and makes him stop moving.

“Steve,” Bucky says. “It’s okay. I need you to take a breath. Can you take a breath?”

He mimes doing this, in case it helps.

Steve shakes his head vigorously. Bucky’s fingers dig into his shoulders and Steve stops. Then he nods and takes a deep, semi-panicked breath.

“Okay,” Bucky says. “Did he leave his equipment?”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “It’s in the back room. He said to be careful since it’s like, his livelihood or whatever, but that it was the least he could do. He’ll come by to pick it up tomorrow.”

Bucky lets Steve go and straightens.

“I can work a camera,” he says.

“Even a fancy one?” Steve asks, biting his lower lip.

“Even a fancy one,” Bucky grins.

Steve doesn’t have to know the reason behind his competence, which is directly related to his deep surveillance activities. If he can snap pictures of ugly HYDRA operatives from two rooftops away through a Nikon Fisheye lens, surely he can use a standard DSLR to document a Long Island bride and her Long Island husband dancing to Bruno Mars and eating overpriced red velvet cake.

“God,” Steve says. He lets out a deep sigh, and finally some of his tension breaks. He runs a hand through his hair, being careful not to mess it up. “I can’t believe this. You’re a literal lifesaver, Bucky. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

Bucky tries not to take that too much to heart, but he can’t help the way it makes his chest glow.

“Think I have a chance at employee of the month?” he says, giving Steve a small little smile.

“I don’t know…the competition is fierce,” Steve says, with a fledgling grin. “I have this employee and he’s like. Extremely competent. Just the fucking best. Looks nice in a suit vest too.”

Bucky looks down at himself and manages to flush. He still hasn’t had the occasion to need a really nice suit, since he hasn’t staffed an actual wedding yet, but he had picked up a nice pair of dark slacks, an elegant, white button-up shirt, and a charcoal-and-silver threaded suit vest he had found on a clearance rack at TJ Maxx a few weeks ago. Just in case.

“Oh,” he says.

“I like what you did with your hair,” Steve says shyly and Bucky’s face warms even more. Steve is looking at him. Obviously not...in _that_ way, but he’s looking at him and he likes Bucky’s suit vest and his little bun.

“I saw um, a post,” Bucky says, embarrassed. “Online. They called it a manbun and said people...liked that kind of thing.”

“They do,” Steve says, his grin widening. For some reason, his eyes look like they’re sparkling, although that might just be Bucky’s rose-tinted Steve Rogers vision.

“I like yours too,” Bucky stutters out. He pauses. “Hair. It looks nice.”

Steve tugs at one of his long, floppy bangs that have come a little loose from the hair gel, his cheeks warming pink a little. He looks so pleased and—strangely—shy, Bucky can’t help himself. He reaches forward and tucks it behind Steve’s ear.

They stare at each other a little goofily for a beat, Bucky’s finger pressed against the space behind Steve’s ear, and Steve looking up at him.

“Thanks,” Steve breathes out.

Bucky feels a little fizzy around the edges, warm and giddy.

He opens his mouth to say...he doesn’t know, really. Something dumb, probably. Luckily for him, he’s interrupted by someone buzzing into Steve’s earpiece. Steve immediately jerks into motion again.

“Okay,” Steve says, shifting into work mode. He nods at Bucky and grabs his metal hand. “Through here. The guests are going to be in through those doors in five minutes. Here, wear this. Just in case I need to give you instructions.”

He shoves another earpiece at Bucky. Bucky nods and clips it into his ear, turning it on. Immediately there’s chatter on the line—the caterer and venue staff and Steve moving into the rhythm of orchestrating the whole affair.

Bucky smiles a little as he picks up the fancy DSLR the wedding photographer left behind. Steve’s turned, talking to someone intensely about the reception run-of-show and Bucky can’t help this either.

He uncaps the camera, puts it up to his eye, focuses the lens, and snaps a picture.

  
It’s a long evening, but Bucky gets into the rhythm of work before too long. It’s kind of fun, even soothing in a way, to stalk around the venue floor, trying to find moments to capture for the happy couple. He hasn’t been to a wedding since the 40s and the entire event has changed significantly from the quiet little affairs his sisters had in the Barnes family backyard. Sure, it’s a bit chaotic, almost overwhelming in how much bigger they’ve gotten, in how many more people now come, and how many staged pictures the bride wants to take, but there’s still a sentimental joy to the entire event that feels familiar—a lighthearted, sweet happiness from the couple and for the couple. It’s a room full of people here to celebrate love, for each other and toward each other, and it makes the air feel alive.

Bucky hasn’t felt sentimental since 1943, but even he’s not immune to atmosphere, to the way the bride and the groom smile at one another when they think no one is looking, or how comfortable they seem in one another’s arms as they dance, or the little looks that pass between them as they feed each other cake. It’s nice, he thinks, as he snaps a picture of the bride leaning against the groom’s shoulder, his arm around her waist. The thought that love can be celebrated. The idea that it doesn’t have to be a quiet, internal act, held close to the chest, but that you can feel it so much that it spills over, onto the people around you, splashing into their smiles, into the way they lift their flutes of champagne and say your names.

It’s nice, he thinks, because love—the act of it, the celebration of it—used to only be for some people and he had never considered it could also be for him, that one day, some time into the future, everything else notwithstanding, he could have this too.

Steve’s voice is murmuring into his earpiece as Bucky takes more pictures—of the bride, laughing, of the groom, bending down to help a little boy with his tie, of bridesmaids whispering together, their dresses rustling and their jewelry clinging, and of the groomsmen, their arms around their mate, the one they’ve lost to love. He snaps a picture of the groom’s mother and him sharing a dance, the flower girl throwing leftover petals at another little girl, the maid of honor standing up and giving a speech, the bride trying not to cry and the groom leaning close to her to press a kiss to his jaw—and Bucky takes comfort in it, at his steady hand and close observation, and at Steve in his ears, the surprisingly low timbre of his voice and how firm and confident it is as Steve tells everyone where they should be and what they should be doing.

At some point, Bucky’s so focused on taking a picture, he doesn’t even register Steve’s question, until he hears his name repeated.

“Buck?” comes through his earpiece again. “You there?”

Bucky lines up the shot and hears the shutter click as he takes it.

“Huh?”

He looks at the LCD monitor to review the picture.

“I said, is everything going okay?” Steve asks.

It’s sweet, the bride’s expression open with happiness as she takes the flower girl’s hands to dance with her.

Bucky nods, although Steve can’t see him.

“Yeah,” he says, with a smile. “Everything’s great.”

  
The night passes quickly, with a DJ who isn’t too terrible, speeches that aren’t egregiously long, and Steve sneaking Bucky looks in between quelling different manners of crisis. Bucky’s mouth quirks up at the corners every time Steve catches his eye and he flat out fails at repressing a grin whenever he sees the expression of pure dread flicker over Steve’s face every time he’s cornered by the mother of the bride.

Bucky goes around the venue with the camera, snapping up shots of every moment he sees, and Steve handles small and large situations that keep popping up over the course of the evening and whenever their paths cross, they pause to sneak food and debrief together.

“How’s the picture taking business?” Steve asks.

“Pretty fun,” Bucky says. “Good thing the memory card on this thing is massive because the bridesmaids cornered me for ten minutes.”

“Just for pictures?” Steve looks at him, grinning and waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

Bucky colors a bit and nudges Steve’s side with his elbow.

“Yes, just for pictures, you asshole.”

Steve grins at Bucky’s disgruntled look.

“I didn’t know there were that many ways to pose,” Bucky says, complaining. “Hands on hips. Hands on someone else’s hips. No hands on hips. Silly picture? No one knows what the fuck that ever means, so why did they make me take ten pictures of them jumping in the air?”

Steve snickers loudly and Bucky sighs, slightly aggrieved and thoroughly put upon.

“This isn’t bad,” Steve says after a moment, popping a small hot dog covered in pastry into his mouth. They lean against the wall near the food. “I liked the tiny quiches better though.”

“Did you try the miniature cupcakes?” Bucky asks. There’s a small mountain of them near the cake, along with an assortment of macarons, miniature eclairs, and truffles.

Steve eyes the table with interest, but shakes his head. He dislodges some of his hair in the process. Without really thinking twice, Bucky reaches forward again and tucks Steve’s stray bangs behind his ears again.

“Thanks,” Steve says, flashing him a smile. “No. What flavor?”

“Chocolate something,” Bucky says. “Cherry maybe? I had four of them. Don’t tell anyone.”

“Are you kidding me?” Steve says. “If the mother of the bride finds out that miniature cupcakes are missing, she might literally call 911.”

“Oh yeah, where is she?” Bucky says, looking around. “Should I call her? She hasn’t pulled you aside in at least five minutes, I’m getting worried. Oh wait, there she i—”

“I will _murder_ you,” Steve hisses, grasping Bucky’s flesh arm and digging his fingers in.

Bucky snickers at that and Steve trods on his foot with feeling while barely refraining from giggling himself.

Steve steals another hot dog and stuffs it into his face, while Bucky grabs a little plastic cup of soda for him. Steve gives him a grateful smile and drains it.

“Thanks,” he says. “God, I’m starving. I always get hungry near the end of the night. I’m too stressed before the first dance to even think about food and then everything gets into a rhythm and wham! Starving.”

“I’m always hungry,” Bucky offers, which is true. Super soldier metabolism is a bitch of a thing. Luckily, he has a few decades of ignoring hunger pangs, but he has to admit all of the steak and potatoes tonight have his stomach grumbling.

“Sometimes they’ll give us food to take home,” Steve says and squints in the direction of the bride and groom. “If they’re not stingy.”

“I’ll take the cupcakes myself when no one’s looking,” Bucky mutters and Steve snickers.

Steve ushers a waiter over and sets his empty plastic cup on the little tray they’re carrying.

“Keep up the good work,” Steve says to them with a nod. Then he turns toward Bucky. “Come over after this. I’ll order pizza and we can relax. Debrief.”

Bucky can’t help but smile at that.

“Yeah?”

“I might be out of wine though,” Steve admits. They drink a lot of wine together.

“I know where I can steal some,” Bucky murmurs, eyeing the door the waiters keep coming in and out of.

Steve must not hear, because Bucky receives no jab in his side for his effort. Instead, Steve sighs and pushes himself off the wall.

“Okay, I have to go deal with the car. One last big thing and then I’ll be free.”

“Good luck,” Bucky says.

“Steal some cupcakes for me,” Steve says, then pauses. “And if the mother of the bride comes looking for me, tell her that I’ve...died.”

Bucky snickers and gives Steve a little salute.

“Aye aye, Captain!” he says.

Steve grins in return. He salutes him back, mutters something into his earpiece, and disappears back into the crowd.

  
The reception wraps up quickly from there. Bucky stays close to the bride and groom and gets some good shots in: a kiss, a speech, the bride hugging her mother and crying, the groom’s father holding onto his son’s shoulder with a proud look, the bride and groom making their retreat to the car waiting for them, sprinklers, cheering, and then it’s all over.

Bucky doesn’t have much to do after the bridal party leaves and the guests slowly trickle out. Steve catches his eye from across the room and motions for him to wait, so he does steal back into the catering area and take an extra bottle of wine. Then he settles himself by the dessert bar and starts popping truffles and miniature eclairs into his mouth—making sure to snag some cupcakes for Steve—while Steve sorts out the waiters, the catering company, the cleaning crew from the venue, and has one last tortured conversation with the mother of the bride.

It takes about an hour or so, but Bucky doesn’t mind.

By the time Steve shows back up, saddled with multiple bags of leftovers, looking positively knackered, Bucky’s feeling whatever the supersoldier version of a sugar high is.

“Ready?” he says, looking up at Steve.

“If I didn’t have dignity and you weren’t my employee, I would literally ask you to carry me home,” Steve says, exhausted.

Bucky smiles and gets up. He takes some of the bags from Steve, slipping the wine and stolen sweets into one of them.

“Give me a few dozen of these cupcakes and I won’t even make you ask.”

*

It takes about forty-five minutes to make the trek back from Long Island and only then because it’s late enough that traffic is blessedly non-existent. Bucky listlessly picks some radio station and lets it play in the background and next to him, Steve is so tired that even after insisting multiple times that he’s _fine_ , he’s _not_ going to fall asleep, Bucky sees his head list toward the window, followed shortly by the soft sounds of steady breathing comes from the passenger’s seat.

It’s a quiet, monotonous drive back, just headlights, some hushed, indiscernible alternative music playing under the hum of the van, and Steve curled up into a small ball next to him. He hasn’t had many nights like this, the soft, undisturbed close to a long day that’s left him exhausted from good, hard work. It’s almost soothing, sitting so still in this small, closed space, with the gentle motion of the car beneath, the bumps and holes in the road churning under the tires, and the dark of the evening enveloping them both from above.

Bucky can’t help but take the moment to smile, a small glow of warmth expanding in his chest. He thinks: he’s happy, and he can’t remember the last time he allowed himself to feel such a thing.

It’s a quiet stretch of safety and peace in the violent, rocky, stupid trajectory of his life, and he doesn’t know if he deserves it, but he’s not willing to take it for granted, all the same.

  
By the time he cuts the engine in front of their apartment building, Steve rouses from his sleep. He uncurls himself from the seat, rubbing his eyes with fists Bucky could easily catch them both in his metal hand. Steve’s fair hair is tousled, his face soft and lax at the edges. It’s not that he usually has his _guard_ up, per se, but he is often wound terribly tight, high-spirited and anxious in his utter perfectionism. Bucky doesn’t think it’s common to see him like this, sleepy and with his shoulders down, so he commits it to memory, just something to revisit when his life inevitably fucks it all back up again.

“I can carry everything upstairs,” Bucky says to Steve, gently. “You should go to bed.”

“No, no, I’m fine,” Steve protests, but is interrupted by a wide yawn.

“Steve, you’re exhausted,” Bucky says. He gives him a look that Steve ignores.

“I just closed my eyes for a second, but now I’m good as new.”

“Steve,” Bucky says again with a frown, but Steve just opens the door, grabbing the bags of wedding food.

“If I don’t hear you knock on my door in the next ten minutes, I’m going to be so mad,” he says, hopping out of the car. “I might even fire you. Which would be sad for me because you’re the best employee I’ve ever had, but also, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s pretty hard to find a job in this economy.”

Bucky looks dubious, eyebrow raised, but Steve just shakes his head and smiles.

“I’ll make coffee,” he says. “And we can eat through the food and shittalk the wedding and watch episodes of The Good Place. So come over?”

Bucky really knows better than to say yes—he can see how red Steve’s eyes are and how he’s nearly stumbling on his feet—but he’s also too dumb for Steve to say no. He can think of no better ending to this weird, long day than to sit on a couch next to him, eating a bag of fancy food they didn’t have to pay for, and watching a TV show about the ethical ramifications of existence.

So even though it’s well past 1 am and even though Steve looks like a feather could knock him over, Bucky gives him a reluctant smile.

“Okay,” he says, shaking his head fondly. “You’re the boss.”

  
Bucky parks the van and brings up as much leftover wedding materials as he can carry in his enormous arms. The rest he leaves in the van for tomorrow and hopes no one’s going to break in to steal excess tulle.

Steve opens the door before he even knocks, a huge grin on his face, as though he’s been waiting for him. In the ten minutes it’s taken Bucky to deal with the car, Steve has changed out of his impeccable suit and is now dressed down in a soft-looking, oversized shirt that says _New York University_ on it and pajama pants with a pattern of little cats in berets that are also doubling as artists. It’s literally so ridiculous and stupidly cute, Bucky nearly falls over with his arm full of tinsel.

“Oh thank god, I didn’t really want to have to fire you,” Steve says, as though relieved. “Your van is really big and you’re better than me at macrame.”

“I watched a lot of YouTube videos one weekend,” Bucky says with a grin of his own. He holds up his arms of stuff.

“Pile it all on the dining table, that’s a disaster for future me to deal with,” Steve says. He moves back from the doorway to allow Bucky through and closes the door behind him.

Bucky does as he’s told, toeing off his shoes at the door.

“I’ve heated up the food and queued up Netflix,” Steve says from near the couch. “By the way, where did this bottle of wine and a thousand mini cupcakes come from?”

“Couldn’t say,” Bucky says. “A fairy, maybe.”

“My fairy Buckmother?” Steve asks, hands on his hips, and Bucky looks as innocent as he most certainly is not.

“I think I’d be a better witch than a fairy,” Bucky says. He reaches the couch and Steve hands him a glass of wine, which Bucky takes gratefully.

“Is it the warty nose? That’s hot,” Steve says. He grins and folds himself up on his side of the couch.

“That’s a stereotype,” Bucky replies. “But thank you.”

“Flying would be pretty cool,” Steve admits and takes a sip of his wine.

Bucky thinks, distantly, of Wilson and his stupid fucking wings.

“Yeah,” he says and takes a mouthful himself.

“But potions seem like a lot of work,” Steve muses. He screws up his face thoughtfully. “I hate cooking. Anyway, I think I’d want to be a cyclops.”

That makes Bucky pause, blinking at the small man across from him.

“What?”

“I don’t know, something about having one eye that shoots laser beams,” Steve says, with enthusiasm. “Think of how many things you could melt.”

Bucky stares at him.

“I want to set things on fire!” Steve says.

Bucky stares at him some more.

“Fire!”

Note to self: do not let Steve near a match.

“You’re a little weird, you know that?”

Steve just grins and takes another mouthful of his drink.

There are two plates filled to the brim with food on the coffee table. They each grab the one closest to him and tuck in, debriefing about the wedding—what worked, what didn’t work, what to do next time one of the groomsmen gets so drunk he tries to put his whole face into an entire cake—over steak and mashed potatoes and bread rolls and crudites.

It’s fun, easy conversation, and Bucky is surprised by how much he has to say. Steve just continues grinning at him over his plate of food, taking small bites in between larger gulps of drink, and teasing Bucky about how the flower girl and her little friends clearly had a crush on him.

Bucky flushes and glares at him and does a poor job of hiding how much he’s grinning behind his clear glass.

“If I didn’t know better,” Steve says, after Bucky, leaning in close, relays some of the drama he had heard brewing at the bridesmaids table, “I would say you had fun.”

Fun?

That surprises Bucky to hear. It surprises Bucky even more to learn, after a moment’s contemplation, that it’s true.

“I did,” he says, almost astonished. “I had fun at the wedding.”

Steve’s smile brightens at that.

“I was hoping you did,” is all he says, but even that seems to glow somewhere near Bucky’s center.

Bucky finishes his plate while Steve chatters about the mess that happened behind the scenes with the caterer, the mother of the groom, and about 200 crostinis that no one had ordered. It’s always enjoyable to hear Steve talk and it’s even better, at this late hour, for Bucky to not have to contribute anything more than the occasional question, unless he wants to. He’s getting sleepy himself, not that he’ll admit it, because he doesn’t want to give Steve a reason to ask him to leave. Maybe it’s selfish, because Steve deserves his rest, but he likes getting to sit here across from him, watching Steve be animated about wedding favors and bridal party pictures, while his face gets pinker with every glass of wine he finishes.

They eventually move onto dessert, much to Bucky’s delight. Steve clears the coffee table while Bucky sets out the platter of stolen baked goods and they split the mini cupcakes between them. Steve’s face brightens as he swallows the chocolate bite with gooey, cherry filling.

“Holy shit,” he breathes out loud.

“Told you.” Bucky grins.

“When I die,” Steve says, taking another cupcake in between his fingers and staring at Bucky seriously. “I want them to serve this at my funeral. That’s an official demand.”

“Am I event planning your funeral, boss?” Bucky asks and swallows his own bite.

“Yes,” Steve says. “I trust no other.”

Bucky only barely bites back a stupid grin at that.

“Noted,” he says. “In that case, I’m inviting no one and eating the entire spread.”

Steve considers this and nods.

“Understandable,” he says.

Bucky feels pleased and eats another three miniature cupcakes.

  
Eventually, they settle back on the couch together, closer than they had been before. Steve turns on The Good Place and after a while, pulls his legs in under him. He leans a little against Bucky and Bucky quietly swallows, his skin thrumming against the warm line of Steve’s body. He gives it a minute before laying his arm across the back of the couch. Steve, either consciously or not, takes that as his cue to tuck in closer.

Bucky sits as still as possible, so as not to disrupt Steve, and in exchange, he finds Steve happily nestling against him, the later it gets and the heavier his eyelids seem to droop.

“Buck,” Steve murmurs at some point, eyelids half-closed, while Chidi tries to teach Eleanor something on the screen.

“Yeah, Steve?”

Steve’s hair brushes Bucky’s neck and he becomes suddenly aware that Steve’s head is leaning against his shoulder. He hopes Steve can’t hear how loudly his heart is beating.

“The big wedding,” Steve murmurs. “That you’ve been helping me with. My friend.”

“The diva?” Bucky asks.

Steve chuckles sleepily.

“Yeah.”

“Is it going okay?” Bucky asks quietly.

Tahani appears on the screen and Eleanor makes some witty remarks. Bucky smiles at it, but he’s not really paying attention to the show anymore.

“Yeah,” Steve says.

“Do you need more help?” Bucky says. “Anything I can do?”

Steve sleepily moves against him and Bucky holds absolutely stock still, not even breathing at this point.

“Will you come with me?” Steve asks. “To it. To help.”

Bucky can hear his heart pounding in his ears. He can’t imagine Steve can’t feel how fast it’s beating. It feels like it’s about to beat right out of his chest.

“Of course,” he says. Despite everything, his voice holds steady.

“So much work,” Steve murmurs. “Want you to be there with me.”

Bucky’s chest feels abnormally tight. He wonders, briefly, if he’s experiencing a heart attack.

“Of course,” he says again, softly. “Anything for y—the business.”

Steve makes a sleepy kind of noise and Bucky can feel the curve of his smile against his chest.

“Okay,” Steve says. “Thank you. You’re the best.”

Bucky makes a soothing sort of noise, more out of instinct than because his brain is functioning.

On the TV, something else happens, something a little weird, or funny, or maybe poignant, but Bucky doesn’t notice. He can’t notice anything but the small blond tucked against his side, his head now tilted onto Bucky’s chest, his breathing coming out soft and slow. Steve’s eyelashes touch the top of his cheekbones and his mouth is curved softly down in sleep and Bucky thinks, a little wildly: this man is incomprehensibly beautiful.

His skin feels tight and there are sparks flickering up and down his spine as he swallows thickly. Bucky’s heart is racing and his stomach feels cramped and his cheeks are flushed hot.

It feels like he’s having a full body episode, except instead of dissociating, for the first time in his post-supersoldier life, he is incredibly, painfully present.

It’s not so hard to figure out why.

Maybe he had known before and chosen to ignore it, or maybe it only becomes clear right in this moment, at a little past 3 in the morning, with the television murmuring in the background, and Steve fit warmly against his side. Some things are only clear by the quiet hours of the morning.

It’s probably a problem and Steve almost definitely deserves better, but Bucky’s too selfish to let that matter to him. He likes working for Steve—working _with_ Steve. He likes living across the hall from him and getting dinner with him and driving around Brooklyn eating cake and picking up flowers with him. He likes watching the little furrow develop between Steve’s eyes when he’s concentrating on picking an arrangement and he likes the frenetic, almost uncontained energy when Steve is running through the endless list of tasks they need to finish the night before a wedding, and he even likes listening to him on the phone with vendors, the way his voice gets tight and higher the more displeased and exasperated he gets. He likes sitting next to him on the couch, drinking wine, tucked in close, and watching a show they’re not really watching.

Bucky likes almost everything he does with Steve.

He likes— _more than likes_ — _Steve_.

It’s no longer a question. Briefly, he wonders if it ever was one, or if, maybe, he had been a lost cause from the moment he had looked up from the ground and seen a head of fair, blond hair and bright blue eyes.

He has it _bad_ Bad.

What’s a fucking former mercenary of a supersoldier to do?

Shaking his head slightly, Bucky reaches a hand up and gently, barely moving, barely even breathing, he tucks a lock of soft, blond hair behind Steve’s ear. In his sleep, Steve lets out a soft, drowsy noise, and, in response, Bucky can feel his entire chest just warm right up.

 _Oh, Barnes_ , Bucky thinks to himself, with a quiet, resigned sigh. _You’re really in it now_.

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> GIRL, YOU IN DANGER @ The Winter Soldier, Bucky Barnes

**Author's Note:**

> \+ This fic will be posting on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays until completion! 
> 
> \+ As ever, if my words made you laugh at all, you are contractually obligated, through the bylaws of AO3, to tell me. Thank you for reading!! ♥
> 
> \+ If you'd like, you can retweet this fic on Twitter [here](https://twitter.com/spacerenegaydes/status/1373001331602984962?s=20) and reblog it on Tumblr [here](https://spacerenegades.tumblr.com/post/646113927239991296/the-wedding-planners-assistant-35k)! 
> 
> \+ I can be found on [my new Twitter](https://twitter.com/spacerenegaydes) and sometimes on [Tumblr](https://spacerenegades.tumblr.com/). ♥


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